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Iron Knife from ritual dinner. (©Archaeological Exploration of Sardis/President and Fellows of Harvard College) -
Ritual Dinner Iron Knife
The Lydians and their World
(2010)
Cat. 46
- Date
- Ca. 575-525 BC, Lydian
- Museum
- Manisa, Archaeological and Ethnographic Museum, 5363
- Museum Inventory No.
- 5363
- Sardis or Museum Inv. No.
- M70.001
- Material
- Iron
- Object Type
- Metalwork
- Metalwork Type
- Tool
- Site
- Sardis
- Sector
- PN
- Trench
- PN
- Locus
- PN Locus cd26
- B-Grid Coordinates
- W248 / S371 *86.6 - 86.4
- Description
- Iron. Blade and tang. Stoney accretions on blade. On tang, orange powdery substance with wood-like grain.
- Dimensions
- Total length 0.229 m, length of tang 0.05 m.
- Comments
- The substance with wood-like grain on the tang probably is residue from a wooden handle. A total of 16 knives were reported from the total 26 deposits, and 10 knives have been available for study. All of those 10 are iron and have tangs for handle attachment. Blades vary from straight to curved, i.e., humpbacked. Tangs are either flat, as broad as the blade, and fitted with rivets, or slender and tapering (as in No. 46); and several had either traces of wood or wood pseudomorphs. Blade lengths ranged from 0.185 m to 0.085 m. Iron was a common utilitarian metal at Sardis already in the seventh century BC, if not earlier.
- See Also
- Greenewalt, “Bon Appetit”; Greenewalt, “Gods of Lydia”; Cahill, “City of Sardis”; Greenewalt, “Lydian Pottery”.
- Bibliography
- Greenewalt 1978, 76, no. cd 26.5.
- Author
- CHG