Large Western Asiatic Bronze Dagger

1800-1600 B.C.

12 3/4 in. (218 grams, 32.5 cm).

Tapering blade with raised midrib developing to a short tang pierced at the finial.

Provenance

Ex London art market, 1980-1990s.
This lot has been cleared against the Art Loss Register database, and is accompanied by an illustrated lot declaration signed by the Head of the Antiquities Department, Dr Raffaele D'Amato.

Literature

Cf. for the type Gorelik, M., Weapons of Ancient East, IV millennium BC-IV century BC, Saint Petersburg, 2003, in Russian, see pl.IV, no.40, from Western Iran.

Footnotes

Around the 17th century BC, Hyksos craftsmen apparently invented daggers with an elongated, narrow blade of a subtriangular shape, sometimes with a mid-rib, but more often flat, and a handle cast together with the blade, flat, fairly wide, with a pronounced, sometimes sharply, more often smoothly, pommel and crossguard. Such daggers very quickly gained popularity in Mesopotamia and further to the east and northeast, as well as to the northwest, in the Aegean, and became almost the most widespread type of dagger in these regions up until the middle of the 1st millennium B.C.

CONDITION

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LOT 1228