Where to Find Kopis and Machaira Swords

Over on corporate social media, I often see people looking at copies of Illyrian and Iberian swords to understand Greek cleavers. Long war knives spread from Anatolia to Iberia before the Roman empire, but each culture had its own interpretation of these knives. The Iberian swords are very charismatic with decorative fullers and inlays and deep bends, but different from the Greek version of this weapon. Modern copies always differ from the originals, and most of them are based on other modern copies not the artifacts themselves. So this month I will talk about where to find photos and drawings of the original artifacts, then about why these images take a bit of work to find. I hope that will interest different parts of my readership and that I have time for a different topic in March.

Books with Original Artifacts

People reading this post are probably looking for in the weapons with handguards and hooked pommels in the form of a bird’s head (similar swords from other cultures often have hilts shaped like a horse’s head). However, these grew out of earlier large knives and cleavers which might have been weapons or might have been more tools for butchers and priests sacrificing livestock. Archaeologists are interested in development over time so often cover both the earlier and the later forms.

• Probably the best place to start is Marek Verčík‘s book. He has scaled drawings with cross-sections of 14 weapons, a typology with eight nine groups, and a catalogue of 86 from the Balkans with full citations (although some of the works cited are not in the bibliography).1 They are not highly technical. His drawings and measurements are taken from earlier publications. Marek Verčík, Die barbarischen Einflüsse in der griechischen Bewaffnung (Rahden-im-Westf.: Verlag Marie Leidorf GmbH, 2014)
• There are all kinds of artifacts from northern Greece in the John S. Latsis Public Benefit Foundation e-Library. The online viewer is a bit awkward and there are no downloads but anyone with a high-speed Internet connection can view these books. Ask your favourite library to request a free print copy.
• There are weights, measurements, and cross-section drawings of several from Olympia in: Holger Baitinger, Die Angriffswaffen aus Olympia (De Gruyter, 2001). This is out of print but available in academic libraries and scans of the section on swords are available on the International Hoplite Discussion facebook group under “files.”
• The sanctuary of Apollo at Kalapodi was full of edged weapons when the Persians burned it in 480 BCE. You can find scale drawings and measurements and a typology in Hans-Otto Schmitt, “Die Angriffswaffen” in Rainer C.S. Felsch, ed., Kalapodi: Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen im Heiligtum der Artemis und des Apollon von Hyampolis in der antiken Phokis, Band II (Philipp von Zabern: Mainz-am-Rhein, 2007) pp. 423-551, Taf. 67-106
• Imma Kilian-Dirlmeier has excellent scale drawings of a few as well as studies of their construction and historical development. This was published in the series Prähistorische Bronzefunde but covers steel swords and long knives as well. Imma Kilian-Dirlmeier, Die Schwerter in Griechenland (ausserhalb der Peloponnes), Bulgarien und Albanien (Franz Steiner Verlag: Stuttgart, 1993)
• There is one very nice kopis from Golyamata Mogila in Daniela Agre, The Tumulus of Golyamata Mogila near the villages of Malomirovo and Zlatinitsa (Sofia: Avalon Publishing, 2011). You can download this book from academia.edu and I have blogged about it.
• There are photos and drawings of a kopis from Sardis on the Sardis Expedition website (Sardis no. M95.007).
• There are photos of another machaira from Seyitömer Höyük in Anatolia in an article by Gökhan Coşkun in the journal Adalya (2017) https://izlik.org/JA22RY85DF
• Yvone Innall has photos and measurements of three from Italy in section 5.3 of her PhD thesis: Yvonne L. Inall, A Typological Assessment of Iron Age Weapons in South Italy (PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 2009) pp. 123-126 (type 5) http://hdl.handle.net/2123/5464
• Fernando Quesada Sanz covers Italian single-edged swords in his books and articles on their relatives in Iberia, above all: Fernando Quesada Sanz, El Armamento Ibérico. Estudio tipológico, geográfico, functional, social y simbólico de las armas en la Cultura ibérica (siglos VI-I a.C.) (1997). I have not seen this one yet!

There is one more from Asia Minor and many from Illyria (Albania and former Yugoslavia). I’m not going to go into those because the books and websites above will give you plenty to get started and are relatively accessible for English speakers.2 None should give your library’s Interlibrary Loan service too much trouble, but a Bulgarian article from the 1930s might.

What Those Artifacts Look Like When Excavated

Greece is short of marshes, deep muddy rivers, and peat bogs. Most ancient weapons survive because they were buried with the dead or devoted to the gods at temples which were burned down or decided to bury some old offerings to make room for new ones. (At Olympia they used them to fill in wells and reinforce the banks of the stadium).

Its hard to keep iron and steel from rusting for 2500 years. Buried iron is often covered with active red rust as soon as it is exposed to fresh oxygen. And many of these weapons were not in good shape when they entered the ground. Weapons from burials were often ritually destroyed by heating them up and folding them like an accordion or breaking off projecting parts. Many of these were extremely quick and light weapons despite being made of soft steel (no ancient Greek, Roman, or Mesopotamian weapon is known to have been successfully quenched).3 The thinner the steel, the less has to rust away before the weapon falls to pieces. Many were buried in their scabbards which have decayed and left encrustations on the blades. This is good if you study textiles and leather from the traces they left, but frustrating if you want to understand the blade (the famous Kirkburn Sword from the Arras Culture in Yorkshire rusted into its enameled bronze and iron sheath in the 2300 years it spent in a grave). So it takes long and tedious work in the conservation laboratory to preserve these weapons, and after conservation they are blackened, twisted, and misshapen. They often fall apart into several pieces.

One of the technical terms is mineralization: the remains of these weapons are no longer iron and steel, but something like very rich iron ore in the shape of the lost weapon. You can study mineralized iron but its not as easy to work with as wrought iron or bloomery steel.

Archaeologists in the early 20th century were not very interested in rusted lumps of iron, and in southern Greece burials no longer contain weapons by the time that the fighting knives with handguards appear. So early excavations of cemeteries and city centres did not turn up many. In recent times, most archaeological finds are stuck in the country where they were found. Most of the serious archaeology in Greece and Bulgaria is by Greeks, Bulgarians, and Germans. So the original objects are in museums in Greece, North Macedonia, and Bulgaria and published in continental European languages. Photographs are not very helpful, you need to spend hours sitting with the objects and drawing them, after the conservation team spent weeks carefully cleaning the iron and stopping the active rust.

Books with all those drawings and measurements are expensive because they need archival-quality paper and skilled editing and have a limited audience. Tens of thousands of people are not willing to buy books about ancient Greek weapons. Often a few edged weapons are published with hundreds of other artifacts, and the price of the book has to cover all of those. There is not yet a large market of makers and reenactors who study the artifacts like in Viking Age archaeology or Imperial Roman archaeology. Without that large market, print runs remain around 200-400 copies, and the price of each copy is high.

There is now a move towards open access in academia: share the book or article freely online and let those who want a paper copy pay for it. This has only been practical for the past twenty years or so and it raises big questions of how to pay for services like layout and proofreading and image processing. There is also a movement towards open data (making individual images or databases searchable) but that requires even more IT services. In the long run open access will be the solution, but academia moves slowly, especially fields which are being dismantled. The Sardis Expedition database and the journal Adalya above are excellent open-access projects.

Why Some Museums Don’t Publish Their Images Online

Many ancient weapons are in regional museums with very limited budgets and IT staffs. Finds in big museums in national capitals are better known. For example, Peter Connolly painted a kopis from Korfu in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, and today there are several reproductions of it. The thing that distinguishes this from a dozen other weapons is that its on display in a museum that almost every visitor to Greece sees, whereas only a few people see the regional museum in Korfu. Professional photography with good lighting and a neutral background is not free either, it takes time to set up and clean up and a display area may have to be closed down during visiting hours. The Royal Ontario Museum can afford to digitalize much more than a museum in rural Macedonia, even before the chatbot swarms started to use up expensive bandwidth and drove some sites offline or behind paywalls. Many museums and regional archaeological services have large backlogs of objects that need conserving and cataloguing, so anything else they do has to be better than that. And of course they prioritize sharing things in the language that the taxpayers who fund them speak.

Why Doesn’t Someone Else Do It?

Books on ancient warfare for a general audience, from publishers such as Osprey and Pen & Sword, could print photos and drawings of these objects. I think that one reason they rarely do this is that contacting institutions in another country that speaks a minority language seems intimidating. Museum bureaucracy can be cumbersome at best, and a language barrier makes that even more difficult. People who write books like this are often in a hurry, so they start with big institutions in their own country and objects that people already recognize. Peter Connolly picked an unusually well-preserved kopis to paint, and many people have made copies of that.

Another reason is that people who buy illustrated books want to see pretty things. Bronzes and ceramics are prettier and easier to understand than lumps of rust that were once edged weapons. It takes skill and money to draw a twisted and rusted weapon, and not every book is written by an artist like Peter Connolly, Ewart Oakeshott, or Roland Warzecha who can see what the original was like.

I know two people who have spent time in small museums in northern Greece sketching and weighing and photographing ancient weapons. If you can travel there, it can be done. Some museums have friendly staff, just nobody dedicated to researching ancient weapons.

Its also possible for anyone to start a list like this on a service like WordPress or Pinterest. Fans of other periods do this all the time. Closed services that you have to log in to see are not the best choice, and ‘free’ services have risks too, but anything you share and collaborate on is better than nothing. Just give as much information as you can about where something came from (reverse image search tools like TinEye are your friend).

I previously wrote about how ancient Greek kit is hard to make. Archaeologists have published most of what you need to know to make it, but you have to track down difficult books in foreign languages. You just can’t get all that information with a quick Google search, and it won’t be as easy to interpret as a sixteenth-century sword in a vitrine. That is frustrating in some ways, but its also what makes this a stimulating hobby.

(scheduled 26 February 2026)

Edit 2026-03-05: mentioned missing bibliography entries, nine not eight types

An Outline of Toby Capwell’s “Armour of the English Knight”

Tobias Capwell, Armour of the English Knight, 1400-1450 (Thomas Del Mar: London, 2015)
308 pages, 24 x 30 cm
All glossy paper, most pages contain at least one line drawing or colour photo
ISBN 978-0-9933246-0-4
GBP 54 (UK, France, Germany, Italy), 64 (other countries) including shipping and handling; I don’t see any reason to believe that it will ever be available from other sellers or in softcover.
Link to publisher’s online store– Link to publisher’s new online store – link to online store with volume 2 AOTEK 1450-1500

After five years of anticipation, the first volume of the results of the inquiries of Toby Capwell into English armour began to arrive at customers’ doors in the middle of October. For reasons which seem good to them, the publisher and author have made very little information about the book available on their website. For quite a few buyers, “a book on English armour by Toby Capwell with drawings by Mac and Jeff Wasson” was all they needed to know. But for those who are on the fence, or waiting for their copy to arrive, I thought it would be helpful to sketch out the sort of things which this volume contains.

This book has a diverse audience. I will do my best to say things which I think armourers and armoured fighters would like to know, then give my own academic thoughts. But this is definitely not a review, and I refuse to find something to quibble about. Since I do not even dabble in fifteenth-century history, there would not be much point. I also refuse to give a summary since this book is newly published.

This is a study of full harnesses in a distinctive style worn by extremely rich men in England and Wales in the early fifteenth century. The main source is effigy sculptures, but documents, literature, funerary brasses, manuscript illuminations, and other kinds of medieval evidence are used to supplement them. The author’s experience as a jouster, and his helpers’ experience making plate armour, are also used to help interpret the sources.

The contents are divided into four parts. First is an introduction which sets the effigies in context in fifteenth-century England and discusses the problems of studying a style of armour which has all been destroyed (52 pages long). Then there are two sections on armour in the periods 1400-1430 (136 pages long) and 1430-1450 (75 pages long), each broken down by part of the body (helmets, cuirasses, shoulder defenses, vambraces, gauntlets, leg armour, sabatons). Last comes a miscellaneous section with a conclusion, the author’s experiences wearing armour in the English style, a bibliography, a list of effigies divided into six styles, a glossary, and two short indices (total 45 pages).

This miscellaneous section contains 25 pages on the famous blackened and gilt harness which he commissioned from Mac, and his experiences planning it, having it built, jousting in it, and having it modified.

All pages are glossy, and some contain double-page spreads of important manuscripts, effigies, paintings, etc. Many of these images are not available online, and all the photos are printed in higher resolution than normal computer screens can display.

There are a series of line drawings by Mac of six typical harnesses representing six styles of English armour. Each is sketched from front, side, and rear for maximum clarity, and each of these views fills half a page.

There are a number of comments by Mac on specific technical problems which armourers in the fifteenth century faced, and how this might have affected the armour that they built.

There are pages of pencil sketches by Jeff Wasson with structural diagrams of different styles of armour and details of motifs, borders, etc. Individual sketches are scattered throughout the book alongside the closeup photos of details.

So for armourers, this is 300 pages on the development of armour in England with photos and sketches of details and suggestions of how to reconstruct it. For armoured fighters, this is 300 pages on the development of armour in England with suggestions of the advantages and disadvantages of different choices. And for academics, this is 300 pages of analysis of armour in England as a social tool and as a martial tool. While the publishers could make it easier and cheaper to buy and quicker and cheaper to deliver, and while this is a specialized book, I think it does what it tries to do very well. Although the shipping is a bit slow and expensive, the basic book is quite cheap for its size and complexity, especially considering that it will not sell thousands of copies. And everything about the physical book is professional.

Now I will put my academic hat back on and say why I think this book is important. Even though I can’t really afford it, and even though my dabblings in medieval history focus on late 14th century Italy rather than early 15th century England, I pre-ordered a copy. This was because I knew two things about this book.

First, it has managed to overcome a series of obstacles which recall the ones which Caesar’s legions laid around Alesia. For some reason conventional publishers are very reluctant to take on serious books about arms and armour. While there is plenty of room for books for beginners, most publishers don’t believe that books capable of teaching knowledgeable people something new will sell enough copies for enough money. Since so few books like that are published by conventional publishers, its hard to know if they are right. So anyone who wants to see serious studies of arms and armour should consider supporting this project. (In the case of the hoplite controversy, one of the things which became obvious in the 1990s and 2000s was that little reliable information about Greek arms and armour which would help understand what they were meant to do was available).

Second, it also shows what is possible when people with different sets of skills, developed inside and outside the university, come together. Although there is one name on the cover, the acknowledgements and notes make it clear that the author has taken advice from armourers, artists, collectors, medievalists with a focus on texts, and people with many other perspectives. Doing that is always an uphill struggle, because people with different backgrounds have different interests and different ideas of how to know what is true, and it is always tempting to give up. So anyone who approves of true interdisciplinary research, where the tools and assumptions of different disciplines reinforce each other rather than being applied in parallel, should consider supporting this project. (Again, in the hoplite controversy, some of the participants are starting to comment that they don’t know enough about what fighting with edged weapons in a group is like, or about the practicalities of making, carrying, and using ancient kit, and some have started to call upon anthropological parallels or crowd dynamics to support the traditional vase paintings and histories).

Edit 2021-10-15: Updated link to publisher’s new online store

Aristotle on the Pelte Shield

Those of us who grew up on Peter Connolly remember that Aristotle defines the pelte shield (Greece and Rome at War p. 48 “Auxiliary Troops”). What did he actually say? A bit of research in March lead me to fragment 498 in Valentine Rose’s Teubner edition of the ‘fragments’ of Aristotle. In classical philology, fragments are places where a surviving text cites or paraphrases a text which is now lost. Only rarely is a fragment literally a damaged manuscript or a scrap of papyrus. Four different texts give some version of Aristotle’s words, but I will translate the version in a commentary on Plato’s Laws:

“For a pelte is a kind of shield, as Aristotle says, which does not have a rim (ἴτυς) and is not covered in bronze, nor does it have oxhide stretched over it (περιτεταμένη) but instead goatskin.”

Like many things Aristotle said, this raises some problems. Xenophon says that some Cretans used peltai covered in bronze which flashed in the sun, and after Aristotle’s death some soldiers in the Macedonian phalanx used the pelte. Does Aristotle mean that these shields just had oxhide on one side, like Tutankhamun’s shields and Polybius’ Roman shields (6.23.3), or on both sides like shields in high medieval Europe? Aristotle’s students at the Academy could ask clarifying questions but its hard to hire a necromancer in Canada and a flight to the Nekromanteion is expensive.

But this passage does tell us that in Aristotle’s world, some shields were covered in cowhide and others in goatskin. Since rawhide and oil-cured hide rot, without his words it would be hard to be sure that these materials were used.

I don’t have a salaried job or a pension to subsidize this site. Help keep me tracking down footnotes with a monthly donation on Patreon or paypal.me or even liberapay

(scheduled 19 March 2022)

Edit 2025-06-11: linked scan of book

Edit 2025-11-10: pointed out that many works of Aristotle are student notes, and we can’t ask him questions after the lecture

#ancient #Aristotle #armsAndArmour #fragments #Plataia2021 #shield #source

Why is this blade 600 years older than its hilt?

You can also find a deeper dive into this particular sword over on our YouTube channel for our Up In Arms series here... https://youtu.be/UrKAFSDNjNc

#armsandarmour #royalarmouries #sword #samurai #museum #history

Royal Armouries
@Royal_Armouries #swords #armaments #museums

What's your historical (or otherwise) fashion ick?

#royalarmouries #museum #history #fashionick #armsandarmour #museums

@Royal_Armouries

Thinking about him (the sainti), an Indian parrying dagger that seems to have one mention in three books, total. I even tried finding articles about it in Hindi hoping it would be more verbose, but I got nothin'. #Historical #ArmsAndArmor #ArmsAndArmour #Sainti

Honestly I should put one of these in the game and if it blows up, someone will eventually pop up and tell me more about it.

At the Mughal court in the first half of the 17th century, jewelled daggers such as this one were given to courtiers as a sign of royal favour. Learn more about this dagger: https://www.wallacecollection.org/art/collection/collection-highlights/jewelled-dagger/

#TheWallaceCollection #ArmsandArmor #ArmsandArmour #Dagger #Art #Armor #Mughal

I'm dubious of marketing patter from someone I normally respect, so a poll: have you ever been interested in firearms history, and do you recognize the phrase "Elisha Collier's flintlock revolver"? This gun does not seem "forgotten" or "little known" to me, its in all the children's books on early firearms.

https://www.forgottenweapons.com/announcing-clockwork-basilisk-headstamps-fifth-book/ #histodons @histodons #armsAndArmour @milhist_Lee