German Archaeologists Unearth 3,000-Year-Old Sword With Shine Still Intact
They just don't build things to last like they used to, and that includes swords. Last week, German officials announced the discovery of a bronze sword at a burial site dating back thousands of years. And despite millennia passing since its use, it still maintains its unique shine all these centuries later.
The discovery was made in the town of Nördlingen between Nuremberg and Stuttgart in southern Germany. According to the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Monuments, the blade is believed to date back to the late 14th century B.C., putting it smack dab in the Middle Bronze Age. The 3,000-year-old blade has a bronze octagonal hilt and is purported to be a burial gift, as it was found among other bronze objects in a grave containing the skeletons of a man, a woman, and a boy.
“The sword and the burial still need to be examined so that our archeologists can categorize this find more precisely,” Mathias Pfiel, the head of the office, said in a statement. “But we can already say that the state of preservation is extraordinary. A find like this is very rare.”
German archaeologists have dug up a Bronze Age sword with an octagonal hilt more than 3,000 years old which is extraordinarily well preserved. It was found in a grave in the southern town of Nördlingen. It is thought to be from the late 14th Century BCEhttps://t.co/hGPMWHo4kB pic.twitter.com/vHVCOvZOVj
— Alfons López Tena 🦇 (@alfonslopeztena) June 17, 2023
Researchers believe it was used as a real weapon and not simply as decoration. “The center of gravity in the front part of the blade indicates that it was balanced mainly for slashing,” the statement read. While it's unusual to find artifacts like swords from this era, they've been found before in burial mounds opened in the 19th century or as individual finds.
No connection to the world of The Legend of Zelda has been made just yet.
