Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch THEE. I have THEE not, And yet I see THEE. Still art thou not fatal visions sensible to feeling, as to sight, or art Thou but a dagger of the mind, a false creation proceeding from the heat of rests brain. I see THEE yet in form as palpable as this which now I draw Thou, marshalst me the way that I was going, and such an instrument I was to use.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
In today's episode and likely a follow up episode, I believe to be discussing daggers, but not just your common everyday daggers and dirks like I know you know most of you are carrying around. But no, we're gonna be busting out some awesome plus two and plus three daggers with all sorts of sacred, sacrificial, historically or culturally significant connotations. As is often the case with these multi part explorations, We're just gonna kind of open the dagger drawer here.
We're going to pull some out and see what we learn, see what we discover. Not entirely sure what all the connections are necessarily gonna be, but I think we're gonna have some interesting artifacts to discuss here.
Were you inspired to do this topic because of recent events in your D and D campaign?
I mean, there are always cool daggers in D and D campaign, so I certainly reflected on that a fair amount, but no real recent things that I can think of. I think my current character doesn't even use a dagger. I mean she probably has one, like your character, unless they just are not allowed to have sharp objects. Probably has a dagger, or you'll have the opportunity to pick one up here there.
Yeah, at this point, I forget how many cult daggers we've stashed into our bag of holding. We got a bunch in there.
Yeah, I just keep throwing them in.
Yeah. No, the shopkeepers want to buy them.
Yeah, the return rate you don't get much back on those, the cultest daggers. I mean, I guess they've been used a lot. They're a little bit dull, yeah, you know, a little bit cursed from their usage. But in that we kind of get into something we will be discussing, and that is like, the dagger does seem to have a special place sometimes in our hearts, sometimes literally in our hearts, I guess. But the dagger itself is of course a human weapon invention that goes way back in
our development of tools. Our ancestors, of course took up various nature facts, you know, found objects, and some of these might have taken on the form of a dagger, you know, some sort of a talent or two, and eventually they went on to create full fledged artifacts, so short stabbing weapons crafted from say flint, ivory or bone, along with some other material to sort of bind things together to make it, you know, more than just one
found implement, but multiple implements brought together into a proper artifact.
I was just trying to think, is there a formal dividing line between the concept of a knife and the concept of a dagger. I can say my usage, which is that I would think of a knife as a all purpose utility tool, whereas a dagger is a weapon. It's something made for violence.
Yeah, I mean it does, it gets it gets a little subjective at times, for sure. I was reading a bit about this because you know, on one hand, you'll have plenty of examples throughout history where someone had a blade that certainly had a utility function. This would be your knife for you know, cutting through bits of rope
or perhaps vegetation, maybe you use it in butchery. But then it might also be a weapon that not only can be used as a weapon, because certainly any knife can be used as a weapon against say other humans or you know, hostile organisms of one sort or the other. But then also sometimes you have you have weapons like this, You have blades that kind of a dual purpose like this, this is your working blade, but if me be it's also your stab in blade.
Huh, and maybe you're eating blade too, exactly.
Yeah, So you know it's going to vary culturally and individually. It's going to depend on the exact size of the weapon. It is worth noting that while the origins of the dagger are essentially like vanish into prehistory, you know, to the extent that we can even know these things, it does seem to predate the sword, but is not as old as the spear. And I think this makes a lot more sense when we sort of get into how
we divide up some of these weapons. I turn to book I frequently reference, and that is Brian Fagan's The Seventy Great Inventions of the Ancient World, and there's a chapter in there dealing with spears and swords and so forth that I've probably referenced in the past that he wrote with Thomas Hewlett, and they point out that scholars tend to decide what is a dagger, a dirk or a sword based purely on blade length, though this method in and of itself doesn't consider the method by which
the blade would have been used. So it's just kind of like, all right, is it how long is it? Is it shorter than a sword? Well, that looks like a dirk. Oh, it's shorter than a dirk. It's a dagger. And that's about, you know, as nuance as they get, you know, leave the other details, I guess, for more
detailed examination of the artifact. But in broad strokes, if you will, that the spear, of course keeps an adversary at a distance, and at a considerable distance if you get into, you know, examples of throwing the spear one way or another, which we've discussed in the show before, but then if the enemy's closer, while the sword allows for a close quarters combat but still keeps the adversary at a modest distance and also allows for a fair
amount of force, but then when we come in even tighter, well, then we get into dirk range and then dagger range, and the weapon becomes increasingly close combat, you know, risky. And also, while all hand weapons are an extension of the human body, you know, factored into the mind's body schema, the dagger is just about as intimate a weapon as
you can get. You know that with a dagger, death and bloodshed are close, like they are, like it's I think it's ultimately one of the things that's so hypnotizing and ticing and like symbolically potent about the dagger is that, like, to get closer you'd be dealing with, like with a weapon you'd be dealing with like brass knuckles or something, right, something that's essentially just parts of the human body slightly augmented, but in terms of a weapon that one bears and
again updates the body schema and kind of makes it a part of you, Like, the dagger is the most intimate of weapons.
I think about that in the context of what often happened in combat between knights wearing plate armor. So if you're both wearing plate armor, it's going to be difficult to hurt each other with a sword and doing cuts and thrusts that just bounce off the plate. So often the way these duels or fights on the battlefield would go would be that you would initially trade blows with longer, heavier weapons at a distance, maybe like a pole arm.
You probably also have a mace with you, and the goal would be to knock your opponent down on the ground or to tire them out and injure them with blunt force, and then usually into the fight by grappling with them and trying to get a killing stroke, by getting up close and using a short blade like a Rondell dagger to try to stab in between the plates of the armor or through the face plate.
Yeah, and that's where it gets really, it gets really I get really squeamish thinking about it. Yeah, and yeah, I mean it would seem this is of course going to vary greatly by you know, individual and culture and proximity to these various martial arts, if you will, But it feels less of a like a dignified art form of battle, and it becomes more just about like personal murder and death at that point.
Yeah, some of the pretty illusions of heroic warfare kind of fade away when you get that close and you see what's really going on.
Yeah, and that makes it such an interesting focal point I think for so many authors and artists throughout time, Like, there's something about a knife fight that is frightening and also tantalizing. So, you know, it should come as no surprise that the Dagger was a frequent point of contemplation for author Jorae Luis Borges. Alongside things like mirrors and labyrinths.
You know, knife fighters pop up again and again his short stories, including nineteen sixty nine's The Encounter, which I think has also I think it was published in The New Yorker under a different title back in the day, but in the collection I have it is listed as The Encounter, and it deals with a violent encounter between a pair of knife fighters or ku chi euros and
the author. In the narrator anyway, it comes to believe that it was not the two men who fought each other ultimately, but the two antique dueling daggers that they wielded.
So it's dagger versus dagger with some human pilots tacked on.
Yeah, I'm gonna read from Borges and translation here it was the weapons, not the men, that fought. And then later this passage they had sought each other for a long time, down the long roads of the province, and at last they had found each other. By that time, their gauchos were dust in the blades of those knives. They're slept and lurked a human grudge. Things last longer than men. Who can say whether the story ends here, Who can say that they will never meet again?
Well, by that logic, the bones of the men could meet again somehow.
Well, yes, but yeah, something but I like it. Yeah yeah, something like this could be said of any weapon, or any antique weapon especially, but yeah, the dagger, especially via its closeness, it's intimacy. You know, it seems especially apt for this kind of reading. You know, perhaps it's just so close to our own bodies and our own wills it becomes like a focal point of our most violent designs and desires that it becomes something more.
Oh yeah, yeah, And I don't think we have to speculate about the symbolic importance of the dagger. I mean, we can literally just see that a huge number of the daggers produced and preserved throughout history are things that, as far as we can tell, might never have actually been used, you know, might never have been used for violence. They were symbols, They were decorations. They were something that people held and kept on their body to look a certain way and to mean something.
Yeah, whether they were actually used in any kind of a particular ritual of use or ritual without use, you know, like what was it used to cut open a you know, an animal in some sort of a practice, or was it just sort of presented or was it more what we might think of as decoration like in some cases We don't know, But yeah, the dagger takes on this important symbolic place in various cultures throughout time.
In fact, I would not say this is not just true of daggers. I would extend this to weapons in all times and places as used by humans. Clearly, I mean obviously they are in many cases actually used for violence or defense. But that's not the only reason people get them. You know, people don't just have weapons because they will literally actually have to use them at some point. A lot of it's about how they make people feel,
how you feel when you have a weapon. It's like a psychological self management issue.
Yeah, yeah, there's something to be said too, how we even end up buying weapons that, first of all, have no conceivable real life purpose. We're not planning to use them, either for a utilitarian purpose or even or even in battle, like people will buy things like cling on battle accents or whatnot.
You know, this is my Samurai sword.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And you know, and again it may be tied to an actual culture, it may be tied to a misrepresentation of a culture or something from a science fiction fantasy show. But yeah, it still takes on this important meaning. And there's something about holding it in our hands. By the way, the knives in that Borgz story, he describes them a fair link for a short story. So I looked up some images of what these things
actually looked like, and I have a picture here for you, Joe. Apparently, the two eyes that the Gauchos would use around the time that the story is taking place consisted of two different sorts of blades. There was the facan this would like a short and it almost looks like a bayonet.
Kind of long, almost dirk like, you know, I would almost think of this as a short sword.
Yeah, it really does look almost like a short sword. It has like a either a U or an S shaped crossguard on it. And then there was another blade called the Dagga, which was which had like a really short guard, so no S or U shapes, and it was apparently double edged. And the Facan especially was a blade that was both something that they would use for work and also if they were to engage in a knife fight, this would be their blade. All right, Well,
let's get into our dagger selections for this episode. We came up with a whole list of possible choices sort of like get things started. And I have to admit this first one that I picked my selection here has everything to do with fantasy and RPGs because it sounds like something from a fantasy or RP. It sounds like it could be the name of a Dungeons and Dragons adventure module. Well, let's hear it, and that is the rock Crystal dagger of the Ivory Lady. So many questions, right,
is it made of rock crystal? Who's the Ivory Lady? What's her deal? Why does she have this blade or why does she want this blade?
And so forth? What's the quest? Yeah, of the Ivory Lady. It makes me think like our Lady of Perpetual Knife.
Yes, so yeah, let's start with the lady in question here, So not to be confused with the Ivory Bengal Lady, which I was momentarily sidetracked by, because this is also a fascinating sounding historical tidbit. The Ivory Bengal Lady is a fourth century CE skeleton found in North Yorkshire, England and apparently of North African origin, so not her different lady. The Ivory Lady in question here that we'll be discussing was found in southwestern Spain, near Seville and adjacent to
the Tolos de Montellierio gravesite. The lady in question first believed to be a man till I believe a twenty twenty one analysis proved otherwise, was a woman of some importance, if not leadership, during the Iberian Copper Age. This would have been between thirty two hundred and twenty two hundred BCE. The main source I was looking at here for this is Amologen and peptide analysis reveal female leadership in copper age, Iberia. And this was by census Penna at all. This was
published in Scientific Reports. It's a really interesting article that of course does a good job it just sort of laying out what was found, what we know about the
body of the Ivory Lady, and what it signifies. But also they make this case that she was evidently like a eating social figure at the time, so perhaps a highly ranking priestess, and not only like a highly ranking priestess, but like perhaps the highly ranking priestess of her time, someone who would have commanded a great deal of power and authority among her people, and in doing so like
retained that aura after death, like for generations. So the Ivory Lady in question here was buried with an African elephant's tusk. Again this is in an Iberian Spain, an ivory comb, an ostrocheg shell, a flint dagger inlaid with amber, which in and of itself is a pretty fascinating sounding dagger, but also a crystal dagger, which I'll come back to.
She also had a large ceramic plate bearing trace elements of wine and cannabis, and some of these items seem to have been buried with her, while others include the crystal dagger, were left as offering some time after her death. Its thought that the crystal dagger was placed maybe some eighty years after her death.
Oh wow.
Yeah, you can find images of this dagger online if you look for ivory lady, crystal dagger, that sort of thing. I included an image here for your Joe though, and you can see the blade and the reconstructed hilt here. So it was composed of rock crystal and had an ivory handle. The ivory, as with the other examples of ivory, would have been imported, and it was decorated with some ninety different decorative beads made of mother of pearl. The
rock crystal itself. This is a transparent, colorless variety of quartz, so it's essentially a quartz dagger. But I think rock crystal, of course, is just going to sound a little more exciting. But still it does very much look like crystal.
Like.
You can imagine this thing perhaps being held up to the light, be it fire light or sunlight, and it being quite an evocative site.
Casting rainbows everywhere. Yeah, I mean perhaps wow. Yeah, So I'm trying to tell just looking at the picture if I'm seeing this correctly, So you said it is transparent or translucent, this is a blade that you can see through to some extent.
To some extent, yeah, one gets the impression that would have done interesting things.
With the light. Yeah.
And so clearly this is a rather different beast than the working and fighting blades we were talking about earlier, Like, this is clearly an item of prestige, of symbolic importance,
and it was finally crafted. So it's a combination of rare materials, imported materials, and also just a high level of craftsmanship, especially when it comes to the working of the rock crystal, which I'm to understand would have been extra labor intensive and also maybe not as ideal for actual use if you were intending to stab a bunch of people with it or use it for some sort of you know, day to day sort of purpose. So it was something that would have signified class and or power.
In this paper, they also include an illustration of what they think the lady, the Ivory Lady might have looked like in life. I included this for you here as well, Joe, and you can see her seated in a position of authority, and you'll notice that they've depicted her with like red pigment over part of her torso. And this is actually really key and quite interesting. This would be due to the red and the red ranges from like a bright
scarlet to a brick red form of mercury sulfide. This is cinnabar, and this has been used in various places around the world for pigmentation and everything from art and clothing to cosmetics and body adornment, and it's also been used in various traditional medicines as well. But again it is mercury so far, so it is quite toxic.
And we were not recommending it.
Yes, ye, do not decide that you want to go upgrade your look with cinebar. Now it is toxic. And we know that she used cinnebar because she had quote striking strikingly high levels of mercury in the bones and these revealed intense anti mortem exposure to cinebar, So she would have she would have been using cinnabar on a level that she wouldn't have just picked up through just sort of like casual usage, like she had privileged access to this stuff. So this would again, as with her
association with wine and cannabis. The argument here is that she probably had some sort of priestly role in the society. Now I mentioned already that this grave side is in close proximity to another grave site, that Tolos de Monteluerio site, and there are other women buried there as well, and they also have high levels of mercury due to cinebar and these were seemingly buried, according to the paper, two
or three generations later. And so the assumption here is this they would have been buried close to her grave in an attempt to sort of connect them to her, or because they were you know, they were part of a lineage that was connected to her. And the authors of the paper make an argument for a powerful priestess
class in this coppy age Iberian culture. One of the later buried females had an extra toe on each foot, incidentally, which they point out would have possibly been interpreted as a signifier of her special class and powers.
Interesting.
Yeah, So again, the argument here is that she was an important person, and perhaps more than that, perhaps the
most important person in her society at the time. And so this is not necessarily to say that The argument then therefore is that Copper Age Iberian people were part of a matriarchal society, though some might make that case, but I believe based on the reading here, like the main argument they're making is that previously it's kind of like the default assumption was, oh, they were a patriarchal society, and we can kind of see that in the idea
that when we first discovered the Ivory Lady, we thought she was the Ivory Man, and then we came to realize that error later on with additional analysis, and so the idea here would be that women, and especially the Ivory woman, enjoyed a great deal of power in a society that was socially and politically more complex than we previously thought, or more complex than we previously gave them credit for.
Now.
Sadly, when it comes to the exact significance of the rock Crystal Dagger, you know, we just have to speculate again.
A prestige item made with great skill and imported costly materials, we can only assume it had sacred or even magical attributes in the eyes of the people who crafted it and carried carried on with it, and ultimately buried it with the Ivory lady, and that adjacent gravesite also reveals other examples of rock crystal artifacts, so I don't believe there has been another rock crystal dagger discovered, but there are arrowheads and other examples of the craftsmanship with rock crystal,
so the item wasn't completely a one off. But as far as I can tell, the surviving artifact is one of a kind.
You know, this kind of connects to something I've been thinking about wanting to do on the show for a while. I haven't locked in exactly what the topic would be yet, but something about interesting transparent materials in the ancient world. You know, there are some stories in the ancient texts hard to verify exactly how true they are about things that sound like transparent rocks or something in cases where it would be hard to imagine something of that sort.
But then we do have these, you know, these rock crystals that are at least partially transparent or translucent like we have here with the dagger, So yeah, I think be worth looking at sometimes.
Yeah. Yeah, it reminds me of the episode of Invention that we did on sunglasses and getting into some of these older accounts that may or may not have been something like sunglasses. Yeah, and and of course we also we've talked a little bit about the history of glass and mirrors and so forth as well.
All right, you ready to look at another ancient dagger.
Yeah, I'm putting this one back in the drawer. And yeah, go ahead and pull another one out.
I'm going to talk for a minute here about the bush Barrow dagger. The Bush Barrow dagger is a partially preserved artifact from Bronze Age Britain found inside the ancient barrow grave known as Bush Barrow, which was excavated in the year eighteen oh eight by an English antiquarian named William Cunnington who was working for a patron named Sir Richard cult Whore. Rob if got a photo taken from a bit up in the air a bit overhead that shows Bush Barrow and some of the surrounding grave sites
in this field in England. Bush Barrow is a mound shaped burial site also known as a tumulus, located on a ridge about one kilometer southwest of Stone Hinge, which is so it's part of a larger grave complex known as the Normanton Down Barrow Cemetery. So if you stand at Bush Barrow. You are actually looking out directly over the stone circle at Stone Hinge. It's the good seats.
The bush Barrow Grave dates back to around nineteen hundred BCE, give or take a century or so, so this is a roughly four thousand year old burial and it is famous for being one of the richest Bronze Age tombs in Britain when measured by the quality and quantity of the grave goods deposited with the body inside. So who is this grave four? We don't know the person's name, but it was obviously a figure of great power and status, maybe a great priest or a great warrior or political leader.
Usually this person is referred to as the Bush Barrow Chieftain. If you want to look up some of these artifacts from Bush Barrow online, you can find good photos of them and some good video content about them hosted by the Wilchair Museum and by the Wessex Museums. I think the Wilchair Museum might fall under the Wessex Museums, I'm
not quite sure, but the Wiltshire Museum website. I found a good video hosted by them that sort of goes through the artifacts from Bush Barrow one by one by and it's hosted by an expert affiliated with the museum. So before I get to the main dagger, I want to mention a few other things from this grave that are quite interesting. One is known as the gold lozenge. Lozenge is not just the thing you know grandparents take for when you got a cold. It's another word for
a rhombus or a diamond shape. So to picture this artifact, think of a flat, very thin gold plate shaped like a diamond. It's about one hundred and eighty four millimeters long by one hundred and fifty six millimeters wide, so that's a little over seven inches by six inches and it's about one millimeter thick, so very thin. And on the Wessex Museum's website they include a passage about the discovery of this lozenge in the in the mound from
the text of the original excavation report. So the passage starts off describing attempts by William Cunnington and several allied farmers to dig into the mound. At first they failed to get into the grave, but eventually they break through to the floor of the barrow in September eighteen oh eight and they write, quote, we discovered the skeleton of a stout and tall man lying from south to north. The extreme length of his thigh bone was twenty inches.
Immediately over the breast of the skeleton was a large plate of gold Tumuli plate twenty six, in the form of a lozenge and measuring seven by six inches. It was fixed to a thin piece of wood over the edges of which the gold was lapped. It is perforated at top and bottom for the purpose probably of fastening it to the dress as a breastplate. The even surface of this noble ornament is relieved by indented lines, checks and zigzags, following the shape of the outline and forming
lozenge within lozenge, diminishing gradually towards the center. Rob I included a picture for you to look at here, and I think if you zoom in you can see some of these interesting geometric etchings where you see lozenge within lozenge, like the vision of Ezekiel, but with sharp angles.
Wow, I just have to say, especially in these images, which again there's no like reconstruction of the clothing. It's not placed on a human body or anything, is just set against a field of black. I mean this, I would mistake this for something like a solar sail or. It feels cosmic. You know. There are no etchings that I can see of anything like an animal or a human on them. It really feels kind of alien.
Much like a solar sale. It is made to catch the light. And here's another way may relate to a
solar sale. It may have an astronomical orientation. So speaking of those angles, the angles within angles, one really interesting thing about this gold lozenge is that at the two sharper points of the diamond shape, the points on the longer side, the meeting angle of the outline is eighty one degrees, which also happens to be at the latitude of Stone Hinge, the same as the angle between the sunrise at the winter solstice and the sunrise at the
summer solstice. That, among other features, including the association with Stone Hinge through the burial, has led some experts to speculate that the bush Barrow lozenge is maybe not just a decoration that happens to have these angles, but it has some kind of relationship to astronomy or to the movement of the heavens. At least of the sun. Maybe it could be used as some kind of astronomical orienting or calculator tool, perhaps in conjunction with other tools or infrastructure,
such as the alignment of stone hinge itself. We don't know. That's interesting possibility to think about. And even if it is not actually an astronomical tool of any kind, then this is just a decorative motif. It's interesting to imagine that maybe there would be esthetic reasons for making jewelry intentionally with the exact angle between the soulsticial dawns. It seems to me if so, this would imply a kind of sacred attitude towards certain mathematical ratios relating to the
heavenly bodies. In any case, the precise and complex geometrical design of the lozenge indicates a really sophisticated understanding of mathematics and probably astronomy. Wow.
Yeah, and I mean again, you can kind of you can see that when you look at this artifact, it feels precise.
You know, it has their size.
Yeah yeah, but just you know, without actually busting out a ruler like it just reads in the mind as such, you.
Know, yeah. Yeah. Other things from this grave include a gold belt hook, which I think would be used to hold a dagger in place. There was a ceremonial mace where the haft is banded with decorative bones and the club head is made from a fossil sponge that has been polished smooth. There are a pair of daggers also and an axe. So let's look at one of those two daggers, the more famous one, the one known as
the bush barrow dagger. Now in this case is sort of the opposite of the rock crystal dagger of the Ivory Lady. In the blade I think is the least interesting part. The blade is made of bronze. There are notes by a few sources that the dagger may have been made or forged in Brittany, which is now in
northern France. The original wooden handle is mostly gone disintegrated, but it has been replaced in display at the museum, where it's now held with a modern wooden handle reconstruction, on which are mounted the few pieces of the handle that are still intact. And it's those pieces of the hand that have attracted the most attention and make the bush barrow dagger so extraordinary. So what's the deal? In
its original form? The wooden handle of the stagger was decorated with tens of thousands of microscopically tiny gold studs, so not coated, not made of gold. It wasn't a handle that was solid gold. It wasn't coated in a single flat piece of gold leaf. It was a wooden handle that had these tiny tiny holes in it, bored with a tight with a little bronze all probably, and then it had been coated in some kind of resin, and into those tiny microscopic holes, thousands and thousands of
gold pins had been mounted individually into the wood. Each of these pins about the thickness of a human hair. A human hair, of course, convary in thickness. People often say that the pins are like one fifth of a millimeter wide. They're usually less than a millimeter long, stuck vertically into the handle with their heads. The flat ends overlapping like scales, like the scales of a fish. And they're packed in so tight that there are more than
a thousand for each square centimeter. Rob I've got some pictures for you to look at in the outline here, so you can get an idea of the texture of these pins all crowded together.
Oh wow, This is incredible. It reminds me of that what is the little device with the pins in it that you stick your hand on. It makes an impression of your hand the little yeah yeah, yeah, like imagine that, but with but much smaller and little little gold pins instead of you know, some other metal.
Yeah hair with pins. And they're all crowded right up against each other, in fact, overlapping at the at the ends. Wow. And even though I just gave the dimensions, I am afraid that some of you hearing this might not be understanding how tiny these pins are, how incredible small so rob At least I can show you the third picture I've got here in the outline shows a bunch of the pins that have been separated from their original mounting on the wood of the handle. They're just kind of
scattered as dust in this little dish. They're they're they're so tiny you can barely pick out that they're made of gold. But of course the gold surfaces when all the pins are crowded together, takes on this composite gold appearance. But individually they're so small it's hard to read them as gold.
Yeah, this picture that you have of them and the little dish. It looks it looks like it's crushed up straw or something like. That's how tiny it is. It doesn't even read as gold particles necessarily.
It looks like I've been grinding human to put in food.
Yeah, exactly, it looks like some sort of a herb.
Yeah. So by looking at the parts of the handle that are preserved and seeing how tightly the studs are packed, and then multiplying that density across the total surface area of the decorated part of the original handle, experts have been able to estimate that the intact dagger would have
had about one hundred and forty thousand gold pins. In one of those videos I mentioned put up by the Wheelchair Museum, the curator who's presenting it says, this means if you could place one pin per minute, that would be nine months of work to work on the handle. And indeed, it is hard for me to imagine shaping and mounting one of these microscopic pins, much less one hundred and forty thousand of them packed so close that
their ends are overlapping. It really is amazing. And so there's also I wanted to mention this a tragic story of the original find as told by William Cunnington, quoted
on the Wessex Museum's exhibit. So this is from his text about the dig and he's talking about the discovery of the handle and talking about he was doing the excavation with a father and son digging team named Stephen and John Parker, and he says, quote, the handle of wood belonging to the dagger had been richly and most singularly ornamented by an immense quantity of minute gold rivets,
no thicker than the smallest pin. The end of the handle had been filled with these small points of gold, but in the flat part of the handle these rivets had been most elegantly arranged in a Van Dyke pattern, so as to procure a novel and most pleasing effect. Mister Crocker, talking about their illustrator, who did watercolors of the stuff they discovered, has drawn part of the end of the handle, which may give you a better idea of the whole. When we first discovered these shining points
of gold, we had no concept of their nature. Otherwise we might perhaps have preserved thousands of them, But unfortunately John, with his trowel, had scattered them in every direction before
I had examined them with a glass. Oh no, And I've read elsewhere of this event that when they found the dagger, the wayver Edit described is that the dagger was positioned facing up when it was uncovered, and the excavators mistakenly believed that they had come across the blade of a spear, and so they were trying to dig down deeper to dig out the handle, and apparently Parker's trowel just smashed on in there and caused quote a scatter of shining points of gold, and so he severely
damaged the handle by accident.
Oh wow, yeah, that is tragic. By the way, I had to look this up. I did not know what a Van Dyke pattern is. Maybe I should know what that is, but this is like this would be like little arrows or points.
Yeah, like a I think of it as like sort of like Chevron's I think.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's one of those. If you look up Van Dyke pattern, you're like, you know what it is. You see it all the time, especially in like knitted wear, not so much in ornamental daggers, at least not today.
So back to the question, how on earth would bronze age crafts people do such delicate work with almost microscopic pieces of gold. This would have been again four thousand years ago, long before the invention of the magnifying glass. How would they do it well? One hypothesis suggested by some experts, this is not proven or like the full consensus of experts, but it's an idea that is taken seriously, is that the craft work was done by children. Oh
so what's the reasoning here? Well, I was reading a few articles talking about this idea. These came out around twenty fourteen and when there was some work on this being released, and so there was one article I read in The Guardian by may of Kennedy, another one in The Independent by David Keyes. One thing worth noting is that this is not the only dagger ever found with these microscopically tiny gold studs. It's just, i think, considered
the best one or one of the best. And scientists have proposed that there may have been an industry producing artifacts of this type in Bronze Age Brittany, because that's where the greatest number of the gold pin daggers have been found. So again that would be you know, across the English Channel from England in northern France. The crafts people would likely have required special tools to craft the pins, to cut them and roll them out into these tiny shapes,
and then to set them in place. I've read speculation that for the latter job for setting them, they might have done it with like delicate bone or wooden tweezers. But the real question is how do you see what you're doing? Again, it's hard to communicate if you haven't looked up these magnified pictures. How how tiny these things are.
The Guardian piece by may If Kennedy describes this child goldsmith hypothesis, citing an amusingly named British optician named Ronald B. Rabbits, who argues that he says only children, really children and young teenagers would naturally have eyesight sharp enough to do
craft work like this. So if you imagine they started working on these crafts around age ten, he said that steady work focused on these extremely tiny objects, if you're doing this all the time, would leave probably a lot of them shortsighted by age fifteen and partially blind by
twenty hikes. Yeah, and so Rabbits argued that this would, you know, leave the young goldsmith's unfit to do many other tasks, because if you're, you know, getting to age twenty and you're having a hard time seeing things one meter in front of you, you would need to be cared for in some way. But that maybe these people would be taken care of by the community for their service as specialists in this valuable trade of gold crafting.
Yeah, are you better make me a part of the special priest class if you have one? If I just burned up my eyesight to make your fancy dagger.
Yelts Reading from that article in the Independent quote, by their early twenties, many would have perceived people and objects more than a meter away as just blurred impressions. In a world without spectacles, it would have been impossible for them to operate normally within society, and they would have had no alternative but to continue with and develop their microworking crafts. But ironically, that would have made them valuable
economic assets despite their poor site. You know, I don't think. I guess I was aware that people's eyesight often deteriorates throughout life, but I guess I wasn't aware how much better on average, the eyesight of children and young teenagers is even from you know, that of you, that of adults, people in their twenties who, again, according to this one optician at least, and some other people who have talked about this idea, by that point we probably age out of being able to do work this small.
I mean, I have definitely reached and passed the threshold in my life where I found myself passing things with small, small script to children and saying, hey, can you read this for me?
Yeah?
And then, of course, you know, turning increasingly to various lenses and devices that allow me to to either read text or if I'm working on like a miniature painting on the shirt, it's like I'm wearing multiple magnifying lenses. And then and then I'm I'm left with a rather curious situation where I've been painting on a figure that is going to be used by fellow adults who also
have deteriorated vision. Nobody's going to see any of the details I've been slaving over, and I cannot see them myself without the aid of various lenses.
But it helps to know they're there.
Yeah, I mean, that's the fun of it.
Until you started talking there, I had forgotten, by the fact that you paint miniatures, and so yeah, that's so you have more experience with this kind of very tiny, delicate work using the help of lenses.
Yeah yeah, without lenses, like yeah, would would many painters be able to I mean, they would be able to do something, but you just wouldn't be able to see what you were doing. And so I guess yeah that, I mean, it does seem like such a tragedy. Well, one wonders, though, again you alluded to this, like how these skills that they had developed would still be appliable
to other crafts. You know, maybe maybe maybe not the these precise gold work that they were doing obviously when they were younger, but maybe there there are other crafting skills that they can still utilize at that point in their life. I'm thinking especially of fiber arts, baskets and so forth, you.
Know, yeah, yeah, you know. One of these articles I just mentioned also quote a museum curator I guess this would be at the Wheelchair Museum where these artifacts are kept to named David Dawson, who's talking about just being astonished at how an artifact with gold work this tiny could have been produced and comparing the work done by these ancient people in Bronze Age Britain, or maybe not in Britain, and you know, in the Bronze Age wherever this was made to things done by modern metal workers
and micro artists who you know, make replica pieces, but they are able to work with modern tools, and so he cites their official metal worker that they work with at the museum, a guy named Neil Burridge, who makes replicas, but has called this dagger quote the work of the gods. And it's interesting to think that, you know, the thing that's so hard to explain the work of the gods we don't know, but may well, based on some clues, have actually been the work of children.
Yeah, it's like a divine force, ancient aliens. No, just good old fashioned child labor.
But I think this also really drives home what we were saying earlier about well the often symbolic nature of the dagger design, because I don't you know it with something like this, something so intricate and obviously expensive. You know, this would have been one of the most probably most expensive types of items you could possibly get at this time in history. It can't be that this is for some functional reason. You know, this is a status item.
This means something. It doesn't have all these gold pins because it's like, oh, yeah, it makes the grip feel better. Yeah, maybe it does, but I doubt it. It seems like it's got to be that this is for symbolizing power and prestige and maybe something else.
Yeah. Absolutely, And it's so fascinating again to think about the fact that it is the form of the dagger, something that at a very base level is again just a tool that we invented, that we created that gives us the powers of having talents or something, you know, making up for the biological limitations of the human body and giving us the sharp edge. Uh and uh yeah, and here we see like the function of it, uh,
you know, transformed into the symbolic. So yeah, it's fascinating to think about these objects and try and imagine, well, especially in these cases again where we don't really we don't know all the ins and outs of what it symbolized exactly and what was said about the blade, what it was even called. Uh, but we know that it was important because we can see how much work went into it. All Right, we're gonna go ahead and close up part one here, but we'll be back in the
next episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. I'm not sure exactly which daggers we're going to discuss, but we have a we have a short list of possibilities we're going to We're gonna pick each one up. We're gonna test its heft and see which ones are gonna be the most interesting to talk about. Uh and if you catch us in time, Hey, if you have a favorite dagger right in, we'd love to hear from you. Likewise, do you have a dagger or something like it that
is important to you culturally historically? Is it a piece of sci fi memorabilia? Write in, send some pictures. We'd love to know more about.
Huge Thanks as always to our excellent audio producer, JJ Possway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.