All-steel akinakes by Gladush Dmitry

The akinakai from Deve Hüyük are the best examples known to me this kind of dagger designed for combat in an Achaemenid context.  They have plain iron hilts with T-pommels and very short blades which probably reached a maximum of only about 9 inches (23cm) before corrosion, sometimes having low mid-ridges.  I think they are likely one of the best choices for a middle-class soldier's sidearm.  The design would also work for a Western Scythian impression.

I commissioned this reproduction based an akinakes held at the British Museum from Gladush Dmitry, proprietor of Etsy shop Fantasycraft39, based in Kaliningrad, Russia.  Gladush will produce the same design for you on request.  The blade is heat-treated 60C2 high-carbon steel.  If you only want one for display and non-contact reenactment, a lower price is available for a mild steel blade.  Gladush and I discussed the requirements at length; he was very accommodating to my feedback on improvements.

It's vital to note at the outset that due to domestic laws in Kaliningrad Oblast, the dagger ships in two pieces, so you either have to be able to peen the tang yourself (or find a friend who has the tools and knowhow), or weld it.  I attempted to peen the tang and failed, so I wound up having it finished by a local welding shop, Weld Republic in Newtown (the proprietor, Glenn, is another fellow I had a great time working with, and his rates are surprisingly cheap).  Also, the blade cannot be shipped sharp from Kaliningrad, but the edge isn't terribly thick - it's comparable to the factory edge on an Atlanta Cutlery blade - so sharpening it shouldn't be much trouble.

After assembly.  Glenn's weld is completely invisble.

Before assembly.

You'll note that this first edition arrived with edges on the guard that weren't rounded off, but Gladush says that they can be on future daggers, at no additional cost.  Also, while the dimensions of this one are in keeping with historical examples, some buyers may wish for slightly different ones, such as a thicker blade (the British Museum example is only 5mm with the mid-ridge and pretty light, but a few others appear to have been thicker) or a different grip length depending on the size of your hand.  Again, small adjustments won't increase the price.

To improve hold on the grip, I wrapped it in 2mm hemp cord according to an instructional by Tony Drake at RAT (RAT account needed to view full-sized photos; go ahead, it's free).  This kind of wrapping would likely need to be replaced periodically as it became grimy or worked loose, but it seems tight enough to last several battles and is only a few minutes' work.  Lastly, I filled the slight gap between the guard and blade with beeswax-linseed oil to keep water from getting in and rusting inside the hilt.  I suspect a more authentic option, if you can get it, would be something along the lines of melted cutler's resin, put into the hilt before the tang is inserted.

Cast arm fibula

Three years ago, I fabricated an arm fibula out of brass rod.  I was never satisfied with the lack of depth afforded by filing the details into stock that was narrow to begin with, so I've always wanted to replace it with one that was properly cast.

Last semester I took foundry at BCCC again and took the opportunity to make a few more reenactment items.  This one, which I finished up just last week, is wax-cast (as the originals probably were) and based on an example found at the Harvard Art Museum.

Although this is a huge step up from the brass one, I still made a couple of mistakes and compromises.   First, I had been meaning to replicate one from Deve Hüyük, and ran a simple Google search for this purpose, but didn't read the article carefully enough.  This example is of unknown provenance, although the article does point out that it's similar to two Deve Hüyük examples.   All three are of unusually large size, each around 4 inches/10cm long, with "bead and reel" decoration, flared at the base, and having fingers filed in after forging.

I cast it as a blind vent on a larger assembly.  The hand was cast as a bulb.  Unfortunately, I didn't account for shrinkage, resulting in a mushy hole where the wrist should've been, and the bulb fell off during de-gating.  I forged the bulb out into a flared catchplate roughly 1mm thick (finding out, along the way, that the Everdur silicon bronze Bucks uses actually hot-forges nicely).  Luckily, crack lab technician Ray was able to weld the catchplate back on, but the result is a much thinner "wrist" than the original has (it's still thick enough, though).

You'll also note that the proportions are slightly off.  This probably had to do with my inability to sculpt the wax for the beads and reels thin enough, and of course I bent the elbow a little too sharply.  The rough patch on the elbow is a remnant of the chill ball, and I may grind it smoother later on.  The original might have been cast straight and then bent, but I don't think this is the case, since it's slightly thicker where it's bent than immediately above or below.

The other problem that occurred with casting was that the slurry, which is quite thick, apparently failed to flow between most of the very thin wax noodles which formed the reels on my wax positive.  The first pair of reels just below the elbow cast fine. The second cast part of the way.  The rest cast as single thick reels with only a short groove in one or two places around.  This was sufficient as a starting place for me to file the grooves in, but it means that the grooves are sharp and the sides a bit square, unlike the nicely rounded cross section on the original.

The fingers were filed before bending the catchplate over.  It proved too difficult to get the bend in the catchplate to align with the pin, but as you can see, this was a problem with the original as well, so it's perfectly accurate.

I made the hole for the pin with a drill press, unfortunately a bit off-center.  The pin itself is simply a piece of springy 3/32-inch steel welding rod hard-soldered into place.  The original used bronze, but the bronze welding rod at Bucks was too thin and I imagined that brass would contrast unpleasantly with the orangeish Everdur.  In any case iron was also commonly used for arm fibula pins.

Deve Hüyük - the full catalogue

Following Friday's post, I found Roger Moorey's catalogue of finds.  It was embarrassingly easy and I don't know why my earlier searches didn't turn it up, but here goes anyway.  Although most of what's shown is in the form of line drawings, it's still a rich gallery of objects common to our time period.

An important note on time periods:  The site as a whole comprises several phases.  Deve Hüyük I seems to be Neo-Assyrian, while Deve Hüyük II is Achaemenid.  There's also a few Arsacid-period graves in phase II; these are termed Deve Hüyük III.  Therefore if you're interested in any particular object, you need to confirm which phase it belongs to.

Moorey states, on the basis of the long sword and hilt fragments from Persepolis (see OIP #69), that the flanged dagger was used throughout the Achaemenid period.  He also lends some credence to something I've long suspected, that this dagger is the same as the "Elamite" dagger worn by robe-clad Persians and Elamites in period art.

There's a lot of highly decorated pottery, including several "flasks" shaped like pointed amphorae but without handles.  A canteen broadly similar to the ones from Persepolis but slightly different in detail is here described as a "pilgrim flask," while another, highly decorated glazed one is considered to be of Egyptian influence.

Those looking to add more flare to high-class impressions may look to the variety of bronze bracelets, anklets, rings and earrings, many of which should be simple to fabricate from metal rod or strips with annealing and filing.  Beads of all sorts of materials appear, as well as small, ceramic human head and animal pendants.

Among toiletries are a pair of tweezers, several circular bronze mirrors, and tubes and applicator sticks for kohl, a kind of eyeliner.  The kohl tubes and sticks are not necessarily feminine accessories, as Xenophon claims that Astyages, like other Median men, wore "pencillings beneath his eyes."  (Some of the attached codes may clarify this but I'm only skimming for the time being.)

Achaemenid bronze bowls, rhytons, iron akinakai, sagarides, arrowheads, tanged javelin heads, a second gorytos cover decoration, snaffle bits, arm fibulae and cylinder seals mostly reinforce what we already know.  One socketed trilobate arrowhead is attached to a bronze chain for some reason, and most of the spearheads run to proportionally rather narrow, though they may have corroded at the edges.  There's also a bronze bell described as a horse fitting.

Further perspective on grave finds from Deve Hüyük

I stumbled across this Halehs World of Archaeology post on architecture at Paphos.  I haven't read the whole article yet but I was drawn to a section about three quarters of the way down discussing Deve Hüyük:

Also the pottery, “coarse redware lamps”, accompanying the dead soldiers, showed no likeness what so ever with any objects from the same period from Palestine, Syria or Iraq. However they do look extremely similar to finds in Dailaman in “…south-western shore of the Caspian Sea” in Iran.

Even though these finds do point to Iranian origins, they are not local to Persis or the Persians. It rather appears that these soldiers were from northern Iran, probably along the southern shores of the Caspian Sea, were also their “Cist tombs” would have been a local tradition. This region would have been during the Achaemenid period, under the Satrapy of Media.

Sobering thought there.

Most surprising for me is the line drawing featuring a dagger with a flanged tang and crescent pommel.  I may be the last to find this out, but I find the implication interesting that this type of dagger, popularly lumped in with the Luristan bronzes but actually widely used in northern Mesopotamia and northern Iran, is accurate (when made of iron) to at least the beginning of the Achaemenid period.

Peoples of the empire: The Hyrcanians

Geographical definition
Hyrcania (O.P. Verkâna or Varkâna, "land of wolves") was the lowland around the southern and southeastern shores of the Caspian, corresponding roughly to the modern Iranian provinces of Gilan, Mazandaran and Golestān and the southwestern corner of Turkmenistan.  It is well-watered and heavily-forested.

History
Hyrcania was apparently added to the empire very early.  It enters history with the Behistun inscription, where it along with Parthia joined the rebellion of Phraortes, pretender to the throne of Media, during the first half of 521 BC.  Darius' father, Hystaspes, was in Parthia at the time and defeated the Parthians and Hyrcanians at the Parthian city Višpauzâtiš.  Darius sent reinforcements from Rhagae to join Hystaspes and inflict another defeat on the rebels at Patigrabanâ, Parthia.

According to Adrian Bivar (Encyclopaedia Iranica), Hyrcania "seems to have been administered as a sub-province of Parthia and is not named separately in the provincial lists of Darius and Xerxes."  It is certain that their histories overlap heavily and that many Achaemenid satraps of one would also be regarded as satraps of the other.  Herodotus says that Hyrcanians participated in Xerxes' invasion as infantry under Megapanus, separately from the Parthians, though (as is frequently the case) I find no mention of what if any role they played in the campaign.

Later Greek sources mention a Hyrcanian named Artabanus (not to be confused with Xerxes' uncle) as the man who assassinated Xerxes in 465 and either killed or engineered the death of Crown Prince Darius.  He then either ruled as king or as regent for Artaxerxes I, who killed Artabanus in turn.

Artaxerxes died in 424.  Ctesias tells a unique variant of the succession, in which the throne was first held by its lawful heir Xerxes II, who was soon murdered by his half-brother Sogdianus.  A third half-brother, Ochus, was then ruling as satrap of Hyrcania and rebelled against Sogdianus, killed him and declared himself Darius II.

Hyrcania becomes less prominent Classical histories for a long while afterward.  A small number of Hyrcanians are said to have fought at the Battle of Gaugamela, where they formed part of the cavalry under Mazaeus, governor of Babylon.  It was through Hyrcania that Darius III fled in July of 330 and was murdered by his own officers.

It was therefore a transformative period in Alexander's kingship that he passed in Hyrcania; he now sought legitimacy in the eyes of the Iranian aristocracy.  From Zadracarta (modern Gorgan) he pursued a campaign against Bessus, on whom the blame for the Great King's assassination was chiefly laid.  It was also here that he began to take Iranians into his court and wear certain Persian royal vestments.

His generals Craterus and Coenus launched strikes against the Tapurians and Mardians, tribes of the Elburz Mountains overlooking the region.  He reaffirmed Darius' satrap Phrataphernes, who served for most of the 320s, sending Alexander supplies out of Hyrcania to relieve the new Great King during his disastrous crossing of the Gedrosian desert.

Phrataphernes retained his post still during the first partition of the Macedonian empire after Alexander's death, but in 321 the satrapy was given to Philip, formerly of Sogdiana; it is unclear whether Phrataphernes died or was ousted.

In 318, Philip was ousted and executed by Macedonian general Peithon during the Wars of the Diadochi.  After much political bloodshed, Hyrcania and Parthia emerged in the early third century as possessions of the Seleucids.  In the second century, these regions became the homelands of the Parni, who integrated with the Parthians and founded the Arsacid dynasty.  The Sassanid dynasty inherited it as a province, and it became a center of resistance to the Arabs in the post-Sassanid period.

In the ensuing centuries, the name of Hyrcania was discarded as a general name for the region and today it is identified as several distinct provinces populated by the Gilaki and Mazanderani peoples, Persian-speakers in the east and Turkmens who settled during the Safavid period.  The modern form of Verkâna, Gorgān, is retained as the name of the provincial capital of Golestān.

Language
I can discover no evidence regarding the language(s) of Hyrcania for our time, or any pre-Islamic time.  However, as the languages of its immediate neighbors in Achaemenid times, Media and Parthia, and the modern languages of the region, Gilaki and Mazanderani, are all Northwestern Iranian languages, I would suppose Achaemenid Hyrcanian to have been as well.

Religion
I have little to go on but would speculate that the names of Artabanus the Hyrcanian and Mithridates (borne by several Arsacid kings) indicate that people in northeastern Iran followed religious traditions not unlike those in Persia.

Clothing
Hyrcanians don't appear in any ancient art that I've come across (at least clearly differentiated from Parthians), but given their location between Media and Parthia, it seems likely that they dressed in a similar manner.  Both their neighbors wore closed tunics, and the Parthians and many other Iranians wore the tiara.  I'd consider it equally plausible that they wore either fitted or loose trousers and either mid-calf boots like the Parthians or Medo-Persian low shoes.

Weapons
Herodotus says that Hyrcanian weapons were the same as Persian ones, presumably to include recurved bows carried in gorytoi, spears, akinakes and wicker shields (all the more likely as he lists them among the infantry in Xerxes' army).  As they do not appear under their name in Achaemenid art, there's no way of checking that claim.  Archaeologist Roger Moorey believed that the finds from Deve Hüyük belonged to Hyrcanians; these (including things like the akinakes and round spear butt) are mostly in line with what is seen in Achaemenid portrayals of Medes and Persians.

Get this

Okay, first I have to announce that there will be no Peoples of the Empire entry tomorrow, as I've been set back by frequent computer crashes and inordinately long reboot times.  Expect it next week at the earliest.

To today's installment:  I've spoken with Lucilla Burns of the University of Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum, where the Persian spear butt from Deve Hüyük is held.  She informs me that the object is hollow and very light.

I received my brass hame ball in the mail a week ago and it's eerie how similar this thing is to the Deve Hüyük spear butt.  Seriously, this piece of horse tack looks more like an ancient artefact that it's not trying to resemble than a lot of "historical replicas" look like the things they are supposed to resemble.

And here it is fitted to a certain window brush handle with a nail and some epoxy.

Of course, it lacks the subtle decoration of the original, and is a shade larger, but on balance, I'd call these allowable drawbacks.  It doesn't provide much counterweight, but that's as it should be, and it's still sturdy enough.  Widely available and not too expensive as reenactment kit goes; just look for a two-inch ball with a sharply-defined socket.  The socket on mine is one inch on the outside and 3/4 inch on the inside, meaning that fitting requires shaving off 1/8 inch all around the end of the handle for several inches, but it's flush with the shaft once that's done.

Deve Hüyük: An Achaemenid graveyard

Shortly before World War I, Charles Woolley and T.E. Lawrence excavated a site in northern Syria:  a graveyard for members of a Persian imperial garrison near the then-Assyrian city of Carchemish.  The site yielded many goods that would have been used in war and day-to-day life by Iranian troops in the 6th-4th centuries BC.  A gallery of finds may be viewed at the British Museum website.  Sadly, the majority of items are unillustrated, but I'd like to highlight a few that may be useful for your living history projects:

A spearhead, in case you needed a reminder just how small these things could be, especially in comparison to modern repros.

A javelin head, looking surprisingly unlike a spearhead.

An akinakes.  To this I would also add examples from Osprey's The Persian Army, also from Deve Hüyük.  Note on all examples the plain iron hilts with guards and grips forged as one piece, and also the short, broad fuller on the longer Osprey example.

A fibula (cloak pin) which should be good for your Cappadocian impression.  (Incidentally, Cappadocians are next week's Peoples of the Empire entry.)

A hand mirror.  Well, everyone needs one sooner or later.

A bronze plate cover for the top end of a gorytos.

The various bronze bowls are also worth checking out, and if you're doing a cavalry impression, you'll want a snaffle bit of appropriate shape.