Archeology Student Spots 5000-Yr-Old Sword Hidden in a Monastery, Analysis Revealed It Was Mistakenly Grouped With Medieval Artifacts
An archeologist made a stunning discovery on a random trip to the Venetian Lagoon. Vittoria Dall'Armellina was a doctoral student when she laid her eyes on an ancient sword displayed in a museum at San Lazzaro degli Armeni, stated Live Science. Her previous research enabled her to link the sword with the Bronze Age and point out the mistake made by the authorities in clubbing it with medieval artifacts.
In 2017, Dall'Armellina then a PhD student at Ca’ Foscari University visited Saint Lazarus monastery in Venetian Lagoon, according to CNN. The monastery is home to the Mekhitarist friars, a congregation of Catholic individuals who settled on the island in 1717. Mekhitarist friars since their settlement have ensured to dedicate as much of their resources as possible towards protecting Armenian antiquities.
The monastery operates a small museum that displays artifacts and archeological discoveries from various ages. During a stroll through that museum, Dall'Armellina spotted a 17-inch-long metal sword. The sword looked very similar to the ones she had examined as part of her studies. Museum officials had labeled the artifact as medieval, which the doctoral student felt was wrong. According to her, it was much older.
To prove her assertion to be true, she collaborated with her superiors at the time and Father Serafino Jamourlian, the monastery's archival researcher. Jamourlian claimed that the sword was part of a shipment sent by Yervant Khorasandjian, a leading civil engineer in the Ottoman Empire, to Father Ghevont Alishan. He scoured through the Armenian autobiographies in the monastery's custody, which indicated that Dall'Armellina's guess about the sword's identity was correct. One of the documents stated that the sword was collected from Kavak, a settlement near the ancient Greek colony of Trebizond.
After two years, experts conclusively confirmed that the metal artifact was around 5,000 years old through analysis, making it one of the oldest swords to be uncovered by archeologists worldwide. Examinations unveiled that the sword was mainly made of arsenical bronze, a mixture of copper and arsenic. This alloy was used to make weapons at the end of the 4th and beginning of the 3rd millennium B.C., before the introduction of bronze.
Experts also noted that the sword's chemical make-up was similar to artifacts unearthed from the Royal Palace of Arslantepe, an archeological site in Eastern Anatolia as well as a weapon currently placed in the Tokat Museum in Turkey that has been traced back to the Sivas region. Along with the composition, the items from the three different locations were also very similar in shape. It was this shape that made Dall'Armellina link the sword to the Bronze Age.
Dall'Armellina had focused her dissertation on funerary items placed inside the Bronze Age royal tombs spotted in the Caucasus, Anatolia, and Aegean regions. During the Bronze Age, a new class of warriors was making progress in these places. Archeologists believe that it was this group that started the custom of forging swords in these regions. These artifacts were used both as weapons and status symbols. Swords were typically placed with their owners in their graves, to showcase their elite status in the society. Professor Elena Rova believes that the monastery sword was invented "between the northern Caucasus and eastern Anatolia" based on the artifacts collected from the region, as per Live Science.