Evans, Arthur: The shaft graves and bee-hive tombs of Mycenae and their interrelation (London, 1929)

MINOAN ORIGIN OF MYCENAE SWORD TYPES

The Shaft-Grave Weapons; Antecedents equally Cretan.

It is equally clear that, with the exception of two abnormal forms, the
bronze weapons found in the Shaft Graves represent Minoan types of which
the simpler ancestral forms are to be found in Cretan soil.

Some of the bronze swords, such as that from the Fifth Shaft Grave
shown in Fig. 18 with an incipient flange, are of very early type, and stand

Fig. 18. Bronze Sword with Gold Plated Studs from Shaft Grave V.

(Length c. 52 cm.)

Fig. 19. Bronze Dagger Blade from smaller tholos at Hagia Triada

(M. M. II a).

in relation to dagfgfer forms such as those of Chamaezi that gfo back to the
very beginning of the Middle Minoan Age. Here the shoulders have
become more angular and are well on their way towards the origin of the
later ' horned ' type. An intermediate form with less angular shoulders is seen
in a dagger-blade, with similar short flanges at the upper extremities of the
blade, from the smaller tholos at Hagia Triada1 (Fig. 19) and the closely
parallel example from Lasithi with engraved designs upon its blade of a
boar-hunt and of a fight between two bulls.2 The Hagia Triada evidence
indicates that this type, which stands in such a near relation to the earliest
Shaft Grave form of broad-sword, had been already evolved in the earlier
phase of M. M. II3—in other words, by about 1900 b. c. On the other hand,
the engraved designs of the Lasithi specimen—originally filled, no doubt,
with some inlay—supply the immediate antecedent stage to the magnificent

1 P. of M., i, p. 195, Fig. 142, c. 2 Ibid., p. 718, Fig. 541, a, b, and p. 719.

3 See ibid., p. 719.