POWER OF SYMBOLS OR SYMBOLS OF POWER? The "long sword" in the Near East and the Aegean in the second millennium BC

A new type of weapon, which would become one of the emblems of an emerging military aristocracy, appears in the cultural landscape of the Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean of the second millennium BC. This is the so-called long sword, an object with a strong symbolic value that accompanies the warriors even after their death; in fact, it is often part of the funerary equipment of sumptuous elite tombs from the Southern Caucasus to Greece. A corpus of about 200 swords originating from the Southern Caucasus, Anatolia, the Levant and the Aegean region, with descriptions previously dispersed in a large number of publications, is the basis upon which some considerations about the origins, development and diffusion of this new type of weapon are advanced here. Furthermore, the joint analysis of the contexts of discovery of the items, the iconographic and, when available, the written sources, makes it possible to advance some hypotheses about the symbolic values of the 'long sword' and the aristocratic ideals which it embodied.