The Book of the Sword

With 293 Illustrations

Sir Richard F. Burton

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780486142319
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia militar y marítima

"The history of the sword is the history of humanity." With these words, British author, Victorian scholar, and world traveler Richard Burton begins his eloquent and exceptionally erudite history of the "Queen of Weapons."
Spanning the centuries and a wide range of cultures, Burton's rich and elegant prose illuminates the sword as both armament and potent symbol. For nearly all peoples of the world, the sword embodied the spirit of chivalry, symbolized justice and martyrdom and represented courage and freedom. In battle, it served universally as a deadly offensive weapon.
Drawing on a wealth of literary, archaeological, anthropological, linguistic, and other sources, the author traces the sword's origins, from its birth as a charred and sharpened stick, through its diverse stages of development, to its full growth in the early Roman Empire. Recounting man's long association with this weapon, the author describes in brilliant detail:
• The ages of wood, bone and born
• The appearance of stone swords and exotic weapons such as the boomerang
• The ages of copper and alloys such as bronze and brass — used in producing the long, narrow blades of rapiers
• The Iron Age during which the Viking sword of carbonized iron took shape — a weapon whose form would set the standard for the next thousand years.
Enhanced by nearly 300 excellent line drawings, the text provides an incredible wealth of detailed data about the sword and its variations: sabre, broadsword, cutlass, scimitar, rapier, foil, and a host of other arms, including dirks, daggers, throwing knives, flails, and much more.
Military and social historians, scholars and students of weaponry, as well as armchair adventurers will find this volume a fascinating, abundantly illustrated and highly readable account of this potent symbol of power.

CHAPTER I.

PREAMBLE : ON THE ORIGIN OF WEAPONS.

MAN’S civilisation began with Fire—how to light it and how to keep it lit. Before he had taken this step, our primal ancestor (or ancestors) evidently led the life of the lower animals. The legend of ‘Iapetus’ bold son’ Prometheus, like many others invented by the Greeks, or rather borrowed from Egypt, contained under the form of fable a deep Truth, a fact, a lesson valuable even in these days. ‘Forethought,’ the elder brother of ‘Afterthought,’ brought down the semina flammæ in a hollow tube from Heaven, or stole it from the chariot of the Sun. Here we have the personification of the Great Unknown, who, finding a cane-brake or a jungle tree fired by lightning or flamed by wind-friction, conceived the idea of feeding the σπ

ρμα πυρòς with fuel. Thus Hermes or Mercury was ‘Pteropédilos’ or ‘Alipes ;’ and his ankles were fitted with ‘Pedila’ or ‘Talaria,’ winged sandals, to show that the soldier fights with his legs as well as with his arms.³

I will not enlarge upon the imperious interest of Hoplology : the history of arms and armour, their connection and their transitions, plays the most important part in the annals of the world.

The first effort of human technology was probably weapon-making. History and travel tell us of no race so rude as to lack artificial means of offence and defence.⁴ To these, indeed, man’s ingenuity and artistic efforts must, in his simple youthtide, have been confined. I do not allude to the complete man, created full-grown in body and mind by the priestly castes of Egypt, Phœnicia, Judæa, Assyria, Persia, and India. The Homo sapiens whom we have to consider is the ‘Adam Kadmon,’⁵ not of the Cabbalist, but of the anthropologist, as soon as he raised himself above the beasts of the field by superiority of brains and hands.

The lower animals are born armed, but not weaponed. The arm, indeed, is rather bestial than human : the weapon is, speaking generally, human, not bestial. Naturalists have doubted, and still doubt, whether in the so-called natural state the lower animals use weapons properly so termed. Colonel A. Lane Fox, a diligent student of primitive warfare, and a distinguished anthropologist,⁶ distinctly holds the hand-stone to be the prehistoric weapon. He quotes (Cat. pp. 156–59) the ape using the hand-stone to crack nutshells; the gorillas defending themselves against the Carthaginians of Hanno; and Pedro de Cieza (Cieça) de Leon ⁷ telling us that ‘when the Spaniards [in Peru] pass under the trees where the monkeys are, these creatures break off branches and throw them down, making faces all the time.’ Even in the days of Strabo (xv. 1) it was asserted that Indian monkeys climb precipices, and roll down stones upon their pursuers—a favourite tactic with savages. Nor, indeed, is it hard to believe that the Simiads, whose quasi-human hand has prehensile powers, bombard their assailants with cocoa-nuts and other missiles. Major Denham (1821–24), a trustworthy traveller, when exploring about Lake Chad, says of the quadrumans of the Yeou country: ‘The monkeys, or, as the Arabs say, men enchanted (Beny Adam meshood),⁸ were so numerous that I saw upwards of a hundred and fifty assembled at one place in the evening. They did not appear at all inclined to give up their ground, but, perched on the top of a bank some twenty feet high, made a terrible noise, and, rather gently than otherwise, pelted us as we approached within a certain distance.’ Herr Holub,⁹ also, was ‘designedly aimed at by a herd of African baboons perched among the trees;’ and on another occasion he and his men had to beat an ignominious retreat from ‘our cousins.’ ‘Hence,’ suggests Colonel A. Lane Fox, ‘our “poor relation” conserves, even when bred abroad and in captivity, the habit of violently shaking the branch by jumping upon it with all its weight, in order that the detached fruit may fall upon the assailant’s head.’ In Egypt, as we see from the tomb-pictures, monkeys (baboons or cynocephali) were taught to assist in gathering fruit, and in acting as torch-bearers. While doing this last duty, their innate petulance caused many a merry scene.¹⁰

I never witnessed this bombardment by monkeys. But when my regiment was stationed at Baroda in Gujarat, several of my brother officers and myself saw an elephant use a weapon. The intelligent animal, which the natives call Háthi (‘the handed’¹¹), was chained to a post during the dangerous season of the wet forehead, and was swaying itself in ill-temper from side to side. Probably offended by the sudden appearance of white faces, it seized with its trunk a heavy billet, and threw it at our heads with a force and a good will that proved the worst intention.

According to Captain Hall—who, however, derived the tale from the Eskimos,¹² the sole living representatives of the palæolithic age in Europe—the polar bear, traditionally reported to throw stones, rolls down, with its quasi-human forepaws, rocks and boulders upon the walrus when found sleeping at the foot of some overhanging cliff. ‘Meister Petz’ aims at the head, and finally brains the stunned prey with the same weapon. Perhaps the account belongs to the category of the ostrich throwing stones, told by many naturalists, including Pliny (x. 1), when, as Father Lobo explained in his ‘Abyssinia,’ the bird only kicks them up during its scouring flight. Similar, too, is the exploded shooting-out of the porcupine’s quills, whereby, according to mediaeval ‘Shoe-tyes’¹³ men have been badly hurt and even killed. On the other hand, the Emu kicks like an Onager¹⁴ and will drive a man from one side of a quarter-deck to the other.

But though Man’s first work was to weapon himself, we must not believe with the Cynics and the Humanitarians that his late appearance in creation, or rather on the stage of life, initiated an unvarying and monotonous course of destructiveness. The great tertiary mammals which preceded him, the hoplotherium, the deinotherium, and other -theria, made earth a vast scene of bloodshed to which his feeble powers could add only a few poor horrors. And even in our day the predatory fishes, that have learned absolutely nothing from man’s inhumanity to man, habitually display as much ferocity as ever disgraced savage human nature.

Primitive man—the post-tertiary animal—was doomed by the very conditions of his being and his media to a life of warfare; a course of offence to obtain his food, and of defence to retain his life. Ulysses ¹⁵ says pathetically :

No thing frailer of force than Man earth breedeth and feedeth;
Man ever feeblest of all on th’ Earth’s face creeping and crawling.

The same sentiment occurs in the ‘Iliad’; and Pliny, the pessimist, writes—‘the only tearful animal, Man.’

The career of these wretches, who had neither ‘minds ’ nor ‘souls,’ was one long campaign against ravenous beasts and their ‘brother’ man-brutes. Peace was never anything to them but a fitful interval of repose. The golden age of the poets was a dream ; as Videlou remarked, ‘Peace means death for all barbarian races.’ The existence of our earliest ancestors was literally the Battle of Life. Then, as now, the Great Gaster was the first Master of Arts, and War was the natural condition of humanity upon which depends the greater part of its progress, its rising from the lower to the higher grade. Hobbism, after all, is partly right : ‘Men were by nature equal, and their only social relation was a state of war.’ Like the children of our modern day, helpless and speechless, primæval Homo possessed, in common with his fellow-creatures, only the instincts necessary for self-support under conditions the most facile. Uncultivated thought is not rich in the productive faculty ; the brain does not create ideas: it only combines them and evolves the novelty of deduction, and the development of what is found existing. Similarly in language, onomatopœia, the imitation of natural sounds, the speech of Man’s babyhood, still endures; and to it we owe our more picturesque and life-life expressions. But, despite their feeble powers, compulsory instruction, the Instructor being Need, was continually urging the Savage and the Barbarian to evolve safety out of danger, comfort out of its contrary.

For man, compelled by necessity of his nature to weapon himself, bears within him the two great principles of Imitation and Progress. Both are, after a fashion, his peculiar attributes, being rudimentary amongst the lower animals, though by no means wholly wanting. His capacity of language, together with secular development of letters and literature, enabled him to accumulate for himself, and to transmit to others, a store of experience acquired through the medium of the senses; and this, once gained, was never wholly lost. By degrees immeasurably slower than among civilised societies, the Savage digested and applied to the Present and to the Future the hoarded wisdom of the Past. The imitative faculty, a preponderating advantage of the featherless biped over the quadruped, taught the former, even in his infancy, to borrow ad libitum, while he lent little or nothing. As a quasi-solitary Hunter¹⁶ he was doomed to fray and foray, to destroying others in order to preserve himself and his family: a condition so constant and universal as to include all others. Become a Shepherd, he fought man and beast to preserve and increase his flocks and herds; and rising to an Agriculturist, he was ever urged to break the peace by greed of gain, by ambition, and by the instinctive longing for excitement.¹⁷

But there was no absolute point of separation, as far as the material universe is concerned, to mark the dawn of a new ‘creative period’; and the Homo Darwiniensis made by the Aristotle of our age, the greatest of En...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• IMPORTANT NOTE
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• FOREWORD.
• Table of Contents
• Table of Figures
• INTRODUCTION.
• LIST OF AUTHORITIES.
• CHAPTER I. - PREAMBLE : ON THE ORIGIN OF WEAPONS.
• CHAPTER II. - MAN’S FIRST WEAPONS—THE STONE AND THE STICK. THE EARLIEST AGES OF WEAPONS. THE AGES OF WOOD, OF BONE, AND OF HORN.
• CHAPTER III. - THE WEAPONS OF THE AGE OF WOOD : THE BOOMERANG AND THE SWORD OF WOOD ; OF STONE, AND OF WOOD AND STONE COMBINED
• CHAPTER IV. - THE PROTO-CHALCITIC OR COPPER AGE OF WEAPONS.
• CHAPTER V. - THE SECOND CHALCITIC AGE OF ALLOYS —BRONZE, BRASS, ETC. : THE AXE AND THE SWORD.
• CHAPTER VI. - THE PROTO-SIDERIC OR EARLY IRON AGE OF WEAPONS.
• CHAPTER VII. - THE SWORD: WHAT IS IT?
• CHAPTER VIII. - THE SWORD IN ANCIENT EGYPT AND IN MODERN AFRICA.
• CHAPTER IX. - THE SWORD IN KHITA-LAND, PALESTINE AND CANAAN; PHŒNICIA AND CARTHAGE; JEWRY, CYPRUS, TROY, AND ETRURIA.
• CHAPTER X. - THE SWORD IN BABYLONIA, ASSYRIA AND PERSIA, AND ANCIENT INDIA
• CHAPTER XI. - THE SWORD IN ANCIENT GREECE: HOMER; HESIOD AND HERODOTUS: MYCENÆ.
• CHAPTER XII. - THE SWORD IN ANCIENT ROME ; THE LEGION AND THE GLADIATOR.
• CHAPTER XIII. - THE SWORD AMONGST THE BARBARIANS (EARLY ROMAN EMPIRE).
• INDEX.