30 CHAPTER 1
determines its basic shape. Between the blade and the socket there is a narrow
section of the spearhead of circular, oval or polygonal cross section called the
neck which in some cases is decorated by ribs, grid-patterned rings or a nodus.
Some blade types are angular near the neck, this part being the shoulder, while
in some other cases a connecting chap with hexagonal or octagonal cross sec-
tion is formed on the lower part of the blade.165
The spearhead was fixed to the wooden shaft by a socket which was manu-
factured from a trapezoid steel sheet termed the socket-wing, which was bent
to conical shape and its edges bent next to or on top of each other. The socket
can be opened or closed, the socket-wings bounded by a clasp, bent next to
each other, bent or hammered on to each other. The socket of a spearhead can
be decorated by facetting or a grid-patterned ring. Metric data of spears are
composed of its length, blade length, blade width, blade thickness, neck diam-
eter, the socket length, the largest outer and inner diameters and the socket
depth (fig. 1).
3.1.2 The Terminology of Edged Weapons
Several terms are used for edged weapons in English, like ‘sword’, ‘sabre’, ‘scimi-
tar’, ‘dagger’, ‘seax’ and ‘falchion’. The straight blade of the sword is either sin-
gle or double-edged, and therefore every edged weapon with a straight blade
is described as a ‘sword’. In the Eastern European archaeological literature
(mainly in Slavonic languages: Russian and Slovakian) the term ‘palash’ is used
for single-edged swords, a term which is omitted in the present study.166
One of the most important questions of the Avar edged weapons’ termi-
nology is the distinction between single-edged swords and sabres. There is no
unambiguous definition of the sabre: various attributes are regarded as criteria
like the curved blade, the false edge or the curved hilt. Most researchers term
all those edged weapons with a curved blade as a sabre,167 while some others
even use this term for swords with straight single-edged blade and false edge.168
In what follows, the term ‘sabre’ will only be applied to curved bladed edged
165 This term was used as ‘Zwischenfutter’ in German by Uta von Freeden (1991, 610).
166 The term ‘palaš’ is only used by Béla Miklós Szőke in Hungarian research on the Avar Age
(Szőke 1992a, 93; Szőke 2002, 77, 80).
167 Most archaeologist agree on this criteria (Hampel 1905, 195–196; Garam 1991a, 152–155).
168 Gyula László was the first to coherently call the sword of Bócsa a ‘sabre’ (László 1955,
228–229, 232) probably as a consequence of the description of the Pershchepina sword as
a ‘straight sabre’ (‘gerade Säbel’) by Joachim Werner (1984, 25).