A small-scale , simple sword put on exhibit at a museum in Venice was thought to be a arm used during medieval times , but the intuition of a graduate student proved that it is much older and belong to a course of standardized blades plant to be the former in the worldly concern .
Vittoria Dall’Armellina , a PhD scholarly person specialize in the evolution of ancient arm , was visiting the San Lazzaro degli Armeni Museum in Venice when she see the small steel in a display cabinet . She noticed that it show greater similarities with those found in Turkey dating back 5,000 years rather than the hundred - old artillery it was placed alongside .
concord to a pressure release issued byCa ’ Foscari University of Venice , Dall’Armellina first turned to a database of Near East antique physical object and found that the simple blade was not list . A search through museum archives plant a worn - out piece of paper written in Armenian that described the sword as having travel from Turkey to Venice , Italy , sometime during the second half of the 19th 100 as a gift from an artwork monger and aggregator . The blade was listed among other items as a donation item to a non-Christian priest .
Its Turkish blood help researchers to retrace the blade back to a type of sword that was common inEastern Anatolia , a small realm locate in the east part of Turkey characterized by dramatic mountains that match the Black Sea . An analytic thinking of the alloy piece of music express that , like other weapons from this time period , the sword is made ofarsenical bronze . At the end of the 4th one C and beginning of the 3rd hundred BCE , arsenic was added to fuzz to make bronze before metalsmiths start adding tin or other constituent metals common during the Bronze Age .
There are no decorations or otherwise seeable inscriptions , embroidery , or trenchant features seen on the vane and its poor depot conditions did not keep any possible clew as to what the blade might have been used for . The research worker say that it could have been for battle or ceremonial purposes but was most in all likelihood used as a grave offer . As warrior emerged in ancient society , their graves were often beautify with goods like weapons and jewel that , over time , may have been nibble up by passersby .
