"Where Did Ancient Libyans Get All That Bronze For Swords?" Topic

I'm looking at old representations from ancient Egyptian temples and it dawned on me, man those are long swords for such a soft metal.

And that made me wonder, where did their desert warriors get that much bronze, an expensive metal in that period?

By comparison it looked as if the Egyptians couldn't fit their troops with solid bronze swords, and they were a much wealthier civilization.

Just wondering.

Dan
PS. In some temple/tomb reliefs the long swords don't look to be as widely used (reserved perhaps for nobles?):

Trade? I think the use of the sword by Libyans was probably pretty limited. I would expect bows and spears to be pretty common.

Hittites mined copper and tin, they were the main source in the eastern Med.

Those long triangular swords were pretty popular, even the Mycenians used them in large numbers. Also remember that any bronze swords that bent or broke were immediately recyclable.

So just about anyone who had a boat could get copper from Cyprus or the mainland north-west of Egypt (which is just one reason the Egyptians were so keen on conquering the area), tin was a bit more of a problem but ship wrecks from around the south of England indicate that there was a thriving import/export arrangement for tin and copper.

The Egyptians were not metal poor themselves, once copper and bronze had been mastered they equipped just about all their troops with some sort of bronze weapon – axes, maces, spears – not just swords. The Kopesh is a bit hard to categorize – is it an axe or a sword? But it seems to have been a preferred hand weapon, and well engineered for bronze (which can be made as hard as iron).

Copper ore is pretty widespread, but tin was the most difficult component to find near the surface, and most of those were exhausted within a few centuries, right?

Dan

Similar to that carried by Sea Peoples, who allied with the Libyans for a while, so probably inter tribal trade.

Cornwall.

There is a lot of talk of proto international trade existing during the late stone age and well into the bronze age and beyond. Cornwell and locations in Wales have extensive mining operations that pulled up WAY more ore than would have been needed locally. The thought is that there was long range trade going one during this period and that ships were constantly sailing about carrying goods. This show on Yahoo gives some highlights from the Welsh point-of-view:

YouTube link

14:30 in is where they start talking about international trade. They have found about 5 MILES of tunnels and the academic they are talking to thinks this is maybe 10% of the total network! She said enough metal came out of that mine to make 10,000,000 axes. That was 4,000 years ago.

The swords were probably used by a relatively small number of men, especially early on. The reliefs of Seti I show far more archers with no sign of a side-arm than men carrying swords.

FWIW, Ramesses III's booty includes about 250 swords but over 2000 quivers. There are fewer bows than quivers – about 600 – but they may have been more easily broken.

Tin comes from the Tin Islands. The claim is they're out in the Ocean, past the Straits of Hercules, but does anyone want to find out so badly they'd sail there? Not that the Phoenicians would take them, anyway.

I also get the feeling the Egyptian army was usually a fairly low priority next to tomb-building. When you've got desert east and west, often barbarians to the south and nothing but the sea to the north, what you really need an army for is to make sure everyone pays taxes.

The Early Kingdom used copper weapons, the Middle Kingdom used bronze and needed to import the tin, and the New Kingdom began iron weapon building. The Egyptians had domestic sources of copper and iron

The copper from the eastern deserts and the Sinai region contained arsenic and was therefore quite hard, for a copper alloy.

An article on tin sources and ancient bronze metallurgy:

PDF link

I think the swords came from Sea People's. It is possible that elite/core warriors had then. Rest were likely armed with usual bow and javelins