Strange Accounts of Ancient "Super" knives and swords: Your thoughts wanted.

[SpyderEdgeForever]

I have studied ancient archaeology, history, and metallurgy, and I came across some very eye-opening and fascinating "legendary/mythological" accounts of various knives and swords and other weapons and tools that ancients wrote about, some as if they were real, operable items. The most common is ofcourse the sword known as "Excaliber" made famous in the tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table at Camelot. Some have speculated that this was a real sword, perhaps a Roman long-sword known as a Spatha (As opposed to the more commonplace Roman short sword known as Gladius), which was issued mostly to Roman calvary units.

But here is a fascinating speculation: How possible or realistic is it, that there did exist an ancient advanced technology base out there, that rivalled even our present technology base, and there really were actual swords and knives made that, in our eyes today, would be considered stuff out of science fiction, but that really existed, and, due to various catastrophies, wars, and other issues, these technologies were lost, buried, corroded, or whatever?

I found an old Chinese-written book that was dusty and the pages cracking and barely held together, that had some English translation to it. It was about the ancient "weapons of the gods" and "primal China". One of the most unique descriptions I read was of what I would call a "Super Blade" that belonged to one of their first emperors, who had nearly super human powers. This knife allegedly could change the length of its blade from that of a dagger or hunting knife, to that of a fully-capable combat sword, had a shiny satin finish to it, and could be folded up to fit INSIDE the emperor's HEAD, so that he could instantly access and whip it out when necessary, and tuck it back there when unnecessary. That sounds very weird, I know, but that is what the book claimed.

I also read Plato's Timeus and Criteus, in which he mentioned the ancient "Atlanteans" having a material called "Adamant", which had the hardness of stone but the toughness of metal, and some claim this was an ancient lost "alchemical metal" which was made through subatomic manipulation.


Is this all just merely ancient fanciful science fiction and fantasy on the part of those people, or, could there be grains of truth to it?

One man pointed out to me that such things as flying carpets could exist if you had an advanced nanotechnology or femtotechnology (manipulation of the atomic nucleus and quarks) base, that allowed you to produce such powerfully compact miniaturized devices that would be integrated into swords and carpets and similiar commonplace structures. For example: A sword or knife that was made of macroscopically visible and well-defined quark fibers or sheets of quarks that were bonded macroscopically with the full strength of the atomic nucleus manifested in a visible to your eye way, would be able to instantly chop through the hardest stone and metal as if they were air. Because the basic material would be somewhere around trillions of times stronger than the strongest hardest steel.

I remember getting into a discussion with a teacher/professor about this very topic. He was very skeptical about the idea of ancient super technologies, and told me this: If these ancients had such advanced devices and materials, how come we do not find them now, how come we do not find their "super garbage"? After all, look at our world. We have mounds of landfills and garbage dumps strewn all over. But I responded with this:

The very fact that they would have a technology base greater than our's would cancel out such garbage. If you can recycle matter down to the atomic level you would not have such wasteful, dangerous, and unsightly things such as garbage dumps. You could break everything down to the atoms or the subatomic particles and be done with it. Perfect 100 percent total recycling.

Furthermore, if that civilization was destroyed by a massive catastrophe, say something that could bury an entire Earth's surface in millions of tons' worth of hardened silt which hardens into solid rock, most of it would be destroyed, from the heat and pressure. The few things that did remain would be buried under these millions of tons of rock and silt layers and every now and then someone may find such "out of place artifacts" and not know their original purposes. Also, some may be mistaken for "ancient religious or art objects".

And then, he is assuming their technology was based on metals and plastics like our's. If their's was based on stones and crystals (ancient quantum computers, for example) and resembled more of the fictional stuff like the "Fortress of Solitude" which you saw displayed in the "Super Man" movies, where Kal El could grow an entire massive fortress of shatter proof crystal from a single crystal seed-device, we would not know what to look for.

[awa54]

Fantasy and fable have existed for as long as humans have told each other stories...

Blades of amazing quality have been made for a very long time and the best of them probably performed quite well even by modern standards, with the exception of not being rust resistant. Most of the "powers" of such weapons were supplied by the wielder, not the weapon, though the swords of legend would have had to be at least good enough to survive combat without breaking.

On the subject of ancient super-technology, I tend to agree with your professor; there is at least trace evidence of an incredible number of cultures and we can plausibly reconstruct (even if just approximately) the technology levels of most of them, if a culture was really that advanced we would find evidence and that culture would likely have been ascendant in their time... Cultures that have risen, dominated and conquered in our past have done it with organization and the human drive to expand and gain power, not magical uber-tech.

I believe that in the Universe there are places where every conceivable reality (and ones we can't imagine) exist, but in our little corner of the Infinite, nano technology is an infant science, a crystal is mostly a pretty rock and magical incantations are just words.

SEF, you should probably read Jack Vance if you haven't already! His Dying Earth stories are amazing visions of far future science/fantasy.

[Doc Dan]

Who knows? We do know that some ancient knives and swords were made from meteorites and were far stronger and better quality than what was available in the day. So, perhaps something like that gave rise to the stories of such swords since they literally came down from the sky, so to speak. However, I note that they have found ancient gliders, that actually fly, that are thousands of years old, and ancient models of what appear to be jet planes, too. There are cities in India and the surrounding regions that appear to have been destroyed in blasts and have residues, that, as far as we know, can only be nuclear. Some of these are still too radioactive to explore properly. So, perhaps there is some truth behind the Mahabarata and etc., after all. And, the Bible (as well as other ancient literature from around the world) describes ancient civilizations, that were much more advanced than those of later times, that were wiped out in a global flood (note that scientists have discovered vast amounts of water beneath the earth's crust, formerly thought to be fiction).

[ChrisinHove]

Dunno. Those things would have been sooo valuable at least some would have found their
way into the hands of the most powerful, and been preserved.

Most likely they were the blades wielded by the best warriors, just better made, or of better materials, either deliberately or by chance.

Remember, also, that ruling classes throughout most of history really were a breed apart - better fed, not worked to death in the struggle for subsistence, and trained constantly in the arts of war.

As an aside, I came across an old, black sword hidden behind a sofa, once, in a house I was surveying. It was the old boy's souvenir from a WW2 Far East prison - an executioners sword. I shudder whenever I think of it.

[Evil D]

I wouldn't put much faith in any of these. If you went back in time with an H1 Rock Salt and showed them that it wouldn't a rust they would probably burn you at the stake for witch craft. In the early days when basic carbon steel was just being crafted there were serious variations in the quality of forging and the basic know how of the smith making blades so an above average blade would seem more than what it really is. Vikings even traveled across the globe to get Damascus because it was so much better than almost anything you could get at the time.

[chuck_roxas45]

[JAfromMN]

Space blade

http://www.thevintagenews.com/2017/05/1 ... -in-china/

[Doc Dan]

There are actually well preserved blades made from meteorites and were highly prized by the rich and famous. They may not be as good as we have today, but they are far better than what was available generally back then. Many of these legends have a basis in fact. The idea of throwing a special sword like Excalibur into the lake, we now know, was a common practice, for example. The Indians believed some of their gods had blue skin. Plutarch said that the ancient gods were simply men of great renown whose stories got embellished over time. There are, in fact, several diseases that cause blue skin. The Blue Fugates of Troublesome Creek, Kentucky, are a famous family in which all had blue skin. Also, ingesting silver can cause the skin to turn a nice blue color.

The point is, that there probably were actual swords of renown of which the stories got embellished over time with the retelling.

[anagarika]

Space blade

http://www.thevintagenews.com/2017/05/1 ... -in-china/

Thanks. I was trying to remember, and this is it. Still sharp after years buried? :eek:

[flasharry]

Well. I doubt that femtotechnoology will ever be really useful until we can generate and manage/contain serious energy levels.. You'd probably need a nearly infinitely strong level of gamma radiation to overcome the strong nuclear force. Results of that type of force interaction would be that resulting atoms would tend to be very unstable.
As for quarks, due to a property known as color confinement, quarks are never directly observed or found to exist on their own as a free particle; they can be found only within hadrons, (such as the family of baryons (protons and neutrons are examples) and mesons. What we know of quarks is due to observation of the hadron class of particles. Quarks originally were theorized as part of a way to order and classify the particles in the hadron family.

Arthur Clarke said that " Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - I could well imagine one culture observing another's technology and not being able to explain it could give rise to apocryphal legends of "magic stuff" that would be passed down and embellished in the passing..

[SpyderEdgeForever]

Here is a related question in regards to ancient steel-makers and knife-smiths: Would it be possible, as some have speculated, for an ancient blacksmith or armorer to have gotten ahold of some iron ore based rocks that had other elements such as chromium or nickel mixed into the iron-mix, and so that with sufficient forging and working of the metal, would have made a sort of "accidental alloy steel" that was stronger and more corrosion-resistant than most standard iron and carbon steel blades of the time? A historian of iron-working told me he thinks this may have been the case with some of the ancient blades made by Rome and other folks.

[Hattori Hanzo]

Hello everyone,

I have a had a lifelong interest in weapons, blades, and the arcane.

I just wanted to chime in to say I agree with Doc Dan on the wide-spread use of meteorites in blades throughout ancient history, civilizations, and numerous ages (e.g. Stone, Bronze, Iron). Here is a recent article that confirms King Tut's dagger was forged from a meteorite.  https://newatlas.com/bronze-age-iron-to ... tes/52474/

SpyderEdgeForever, in Silat, we practice using, among other things, the keris. If you are interested in the historical weaponry of Malaysia, black magic, and poison blades, I suggest you read the book, Keris and other Malay Weapons, by Gerald B. Gardner. Gardner was a very interesting and far out man in his own right, but I digress...

Cheers,

H2

[shunsui]

This is a good example of what ancient people were capable of. I think the only thing holding us back is ourselves.

https://youtu.be/O5_29GTY-ls

[anagarika]

SEF,

The ancient Wootz that’s made into real Damascus was unique. It’s said that once the source dried up, no real Damascus was ever made again, until recent trial by US bladesmith Al Pendray: http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/98 ... -9809.html

Check also history channel on Secret of Viking Sword where the ancient could make very pure carbon steel.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/se ... sword.html

[Doc Dan]

I think that all of these folks looking for space alien technology are giving far to little credit to the miracle that is homo sapiens. We are an incredibly inventive species and I think that all of the "artifacts" that belonged to ancient civilizations, were in fact, the product of human ingenuity.

[MichaelScott]

According to the only “study” referenced, four items, and axes (how many?) were analyzed for the source of their iron content. Not “all” Bronze Age metal tools, artifacts and weapons. Maybe ten. And, there is some alignment with meteoroid iron but nothing conclusive.

“Albert Jambon from the the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France conducted chemical analyses of several Bronze Age samples. Along with King Tut's dagger, Jambon studied a bracelet and headrest belonging to the Egyptian king in 1350 BCE, axes from Syria and China dating back to about 1400 BCE, a Syrian pendant from 2300 BCE, a Turkish dagger from 2500 BCE, and beads from Gerzeh, Egypt, which stretch right back to 3200 BCE, just after the Bronze Age began.”

Thin ground indeed.

[Hattori Hanzo]

@Michael Scott,

Just for the sake of clarity, you are -- in essence -- setting forth a "logic-based" (I presume) proposition that shunsui's reference to the sole Antikythera mechanism is -- a fortiori -- on even "thinner ground, indeed", right? In other words, the existence of one lone artifact is even more tenuous than ten artifacts spanning ~two millennia. Please correct me if I misinterpreted what you were attempting to convey.

Cheers,

HH

[Hattori Hanzo]

For anyone who is interested, here is the Abstract of the actual study referenced above:

Journal of Archaeological Science
Volume 88, December 2017, Pages 47-53
Bronze Age iron: Meteoritic or not? A chemical strategy.
Author: Albert Jambon

Abstract
Bronze Age iron artifacts could be derived from either meteoritic (extraterrestrial) or smelted (terrestrial) iron. This unresolved question is the subject of a controversy: are some, all or none made of smelted iron? In the present paper we propose a geochemical approach, which permits us to differentiate terrestrial from extraterrestrial irons. Instead of evaluating the Ni abundance alone (or the Ni to Fe ratio) we consider the relationship between Fe, Co and Ni abundances and their ratios. The study of meteoritic irons, Bronze Age iron artifacts and ancient terrestrial irons permit us to validate this chemical approach. The major interest is that non-invasive p-XRF analyses provide reliable Fe:Co:Ni abundances, without the need to remove a sample; they can be performed in situ, in the museums where the artifacts are preserved. The few iron objects from the Bronze Age sensu stricto that could be analyzed are definitely made of meteoritic iron, suggesting that speculations about precocious smelting during the Bronze Age should be revised. In a Fe:Co:Ni array the trend exhibited by meteoritic irons departs unambiguously from modern irons and iron ores. The trend of Ni/Fe vs Ni/Co in different analysis points of a single object corroded to variable extents provides a robust criterion for identifying the presence of meteoritic iron. It opens the possibility of tracking when and where the first smelting operations happened, the threshold of a new era. It emphasizes the importance of analytical methods for properly studying the evolution of the use of metals and metal working technologies in our past cultures.

Occam's razor...

Cheers,

HH

[Bill1170]

I’m open to the notion of super technology of great antiquity. The Egyptians had an advanced culture that was ascendant from around 3000 BC to 700 BC. Records indicate that it was most advanced at the beginning and slowly declined for two millennia. If this is true, then the best technology would be the oldest stuff. Some of their megastructures like the Osirion and the great pyramid of Giza are built to a precision we would be hard-pressed to duplicate today. These are the older ones; the later period stuff is still good, but not as technically daunting.

[shunsui]

... Some of their megastructures like the Osirion and the great pyramid of Giza are built to a precision we would be hard-pressed to duplicate today. These are the older ones; the later period stuff is still good, but not as technically daunting.

Probably the advent of Egyptian Value Engineers. :D