3,000 YEAR OLD SWORD discovered in Germany looks like it came from LORD OF THE RINGS!
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ก.พ. 2025
- Well, the honest truth is that we wouldn't necessarily paid much attention to this discovery had it not been for its remarkable state of preservation and beauty.
However, here we have a pinhole introduction to yet another 'culture' and an insight to what must be a forerunner to what we now recognise as a Celtic aesthetic, from which is derived much of the stylistic cues used in romantic fantasy illustrations and films. The Lord of the Rings connection is not so frivolous maybe!
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I worked as an archaeologist on a graveyard site near Landshut in Bavaria in the mid 90's and was allocated a burial which had been mostly robbed but the lower legs were untouched. Excavation revealed thin leather straps down the lower leg with a leather ankle pouch that contained a gold and silver pendant. It shined like new as well and was an important enough find to make the front cover of the Archaeology yearbook. A privilege to find and later see on display in a museum. This sword however is absolutely astonishing and makes me wonder what might have been found on the burial I worked on, had it not been robbed at a later period.
Great show guys!
I'm curious if you still have photos, links, or otherwise any other information on that particular find?
@@mamaharumi Hi, let me dig out what I have and I will get back to you. I have the yearbook and a personal close up photo which I will have to scan.
@@eddelves6318did you find it?
@@steamboatmcg2197 I found the photograph but not the yearbook yet. Not sure how I can share it easily though.
@@eddelves6318liar
I thought it was fake when I first saw it. Stunning object.
Fantastic sword, really shows impressive workmanship from supposedly pre Roman barbarians. Thank guys
This Proves Fallen Angels Taught Humans how to Do everything that Is Bad for us.
@@bradeyherrera-manzano9304 yeah sure whatever drugs you'd on I want some lol
funny enough, this is so much older than Rome that we are closer to the medieval today than this is to Rome
Lucky barbarians😂
They weren't barbarians 🤬
Thanks lads. Very beautiful find! Sometimes objects were made for burial for sure but the apparent lack of use wear could be from re working the blade after combat. I suspect detailed microscopic examination could answer that one for sure. The octagonal hilted swords are earlier than the Urnfield culture and the manufacturing centre of southern Germany where they originated was part of the Tumulus culture. As you say, they were exported to Denmark and later manufactured there too. We know this because some of the decorative features of some of these northern ones were done in a Nordic Bronze Age cultural style. There were close trade and political links between the Tumulus culture and the Nordic Bronze Age region with for example women moving from their homelands to new places where they were married and died, surely in the time honoured tradition of political alliances being reinforced through marriage. So Tumulus culture smiths moving to the north is pretty certain but we don't know if they were sent there, or were paid to be there, or were captives perhaps.
There are hundreds of these swords surviving, known mainly through warrior graves of which there were vast numbers in Denmark (Kristiansen I think estimates there was 10,000 sword burials). The close similarities between the surviving weapons, as well as mapping the distributions, suggests that there only a few workshops (or groups of workshops) producing these swords. It must have been a closely controlled - and very valuable - industry.
Thanks Dan. Have you produced anything related we could find on your channel? R
@ThePrehistoryGuys no problem! I talk about the Tumulus to Urnfield burial traditions in my video Beautiful Women of the bronze age but it's about female burials rather than warriors. I'm sure I talk briefly about this stuff in the First Warriors, Bronze Age Pirates, the First Mercenaries, and other videos but nothing in great detail.
It is Nördlingen my Dears, quite a famous little town with about 20644 inhabitants and first mentioned in 898 AD.
All the same, that is one beautiful and deadly weapon.
Thank You for keeping me up to date. ❤
Greetings from the Münsterland.
Stunning. Full stop stunning!
That looks good enough to pick up and chase Orcs with! It GLOWS!
There's no way that it's 100 percent bronze to be preserved that well ...
That's my sword. I lost it while hiking through Germany in 2008 which explains the condition. I want it back!
😂
Sorry, it's my one, I was looking for a hiding place in 2008 during a bycicle trip through Bavaria coming from Rhineland. Later on I forgot the exact location but I could not report it to the police, since I had stolen it before from an older graveyard anywhere in Lower Saxony during another bycicle trip before coming from Thuringia.. The good quality and condition of the sword is simply to explain: Made in Württemberg, the home base of Mercedes, Porsche, Bosch nowadays.
Maybe an archery specialist, who didn't use his/her sword that often or at all.
I saw the picture by itself on Reddit and thought it was a hoax. I was very pleasantly surprised when I found the source article after some searching and it is indeed real. Really makes you wonder what other treasures are still waiting to be found.
That wondrous sword just screams"I can have you beheaded! Or do it myself." Somebody with power and clout wore that to his death.
Good morning from the sunny SF Bay Area. That is so exciting, wow, just flat out beautiful and worthy of our Lord of the Rings brothers. Thanks for sharing it. 🥰
I wondered if you guys would mention this find and assumed you would :) great stuff as always guys
I love this conversation!!! Thanks for your conversation!
My favorite story is a wealth man named Newman bought a large tract of land. The land tract contained a valley that got named after the new owner. But he had recently changed his name to "Neander."
I love your ceremonial headgear.
I have a modern day replica (soapstone cast) middle bronze age Irish tin-bronze short sword which I need to make a wooden handle for. I also have a separate large ingot of tin bronze which I bought which I could make a bronze handle and pommel from for this bronze sword. The handle area is a bit small for my large hands but I could still use it. The thing with tin bronze is its a bit smelly. It reacts with the moisture from human hands and has quite a strong bronzey bacterial smell. It is a lovely object to hold, even though it is very small compared to a medieval sword which I have a couple of replicas of.
Wow! Thanks both for the pics, info and giggles as always! x
What an amazing find. Yes it resembles Theoden's sword, but I think it looks more like Eomer's sword, Guthwine. There should be an accent over the u and an umlaut over the e but my keyboard is limited to modern English. This may not be as surprising as it first appears as reportedly Weta Workshops based the appearance of the Rohirrim on La Tene culture.
Remarkable! Thank you.
I would be interested to hear about the soil conditions that allowed this degree of preservation.
Indeed a beautiful object. What I don't quite get is how does the 'urn field' idea tie in with what looks like a conventional grave burial?
Thanks, i think I pulled a rib muscle from convulsions over the Urnfield bit.
So brilliant when an ancient artefact is discovered in such good condition.
The city of Nördlingen in itself is a site of history. It lies almost in the middle of a depression of a meteorite impact crater. Thank you so much for this information, what an amazing find!
What a fantastic find.
And to think that with all of our knowledge that we have today, we cannot even make something that would last one hundred years. Our ancestors were very smart and talented. Thanks for bringing this to our attention...the sword is quite beautifully made.
Wow, the ancients were really on the ball back then.
Beautiful blade...but these 3 were clearly not cremated and put in urns in a field, so how are they "Urnfield" culture . I will be curious as to how examination reveals how they died and if it is a family group. Did they die at he same time? Of Disease or violence?
Good Question.
The article does say "most bronze age remains .....belong to the urnfield culture" not that this bronze age burial is of someone from that culture.
Re the woman and child I did wonder if they were killed or committed suicide in order to be part of the assemblage that the man could use in the afterlife. I believe there is some evidence that this occurred. Eg the young woman possibly a slave, buried with an old lady. I forget where exactly but maybe modern Denmark.
No comments on the arrowheads? They're just as good as the sword.
Thanks so much for bringing this to our attention. I would have surely missed it otherwise. I really love you guys! LOL
It brought to mind, Connon the Barbarian to me, beautiful sword.😺🐈👍
Great find and beautiful sword ! Many thanks for these news, still a great pleasure to be able to see such beauty,
I suppose modern europeans can still be classified as an urn-field culture. Or possibly an urn-mantlepiece culture.
I'm metal detecting around a Roman Villa this Sunday. The villa is scheduled so no detecting on it. But We have 80 acres surrounding it. There have been Bronze age, saxon and of course roman finds from this site already, so we are very lucky and I'm super excited.
Thanks for this tidbit. I’m looking forward to more research/information about the DNA as well as the sword and other artifacts.
I was astonished when this broke the news. I would love to read or hear the detailed analysis once the are able to study it in depth. *hinthint*
Where's the sword now?
Urnfield, that burry there died.... except for this family.... Must be a high ranking family... Wonder what the cause of death is.... ? Very nice find !
Well the thing with urn cremation burials is that if needed you can dig them up and carry them with you to somewhere else to re-bury them if you needed to. Maybe these cremation burials were more because of necessity than anything else? If your ancestors mean so much to you. The act of cremation and all the energy expended needed to chop wood for the fire, shows that they had a lot of respect for their dead.
Has there been any updates on this sword or the rest of the burial site
The sword was that of a royal family that was used as a time piece. The blade faces the north star and the top is the time dial.
What struck me most was how shiny the blade is.
Sorry, you talked about the wrong location. It is not Nüdlingen, but Nördlingen. So you zoomed into the wrong area on Google maps. The coordinates are 48.85122, 10.48868. The area is a huge meteorite impact crater. You find more about it on Wikipedia: "Nördlinger Ries". It is located in the north of the Danube river. I live close to it .
I got one of those here in the bottom of the toy box, picked it up from the Dollar store for the grand kids!
Just stunning, just wow, just wow, amazing, just as good as King Tut find, beautifully preserved
Find
Amazing
Beautiful. There is still overlay casting. I've seen a video with steel molds for casting nickel bolsters on hunting knives. The mold may have been clay for a unique piece or stone for production. I have also seen stone molds for the entire bronze sword. TH-cam is good for that kind of thing. Lots of metallurgy and casting here. Right up my alley, along with history.
I've failed with pewter. I did a lost wax cast with the blade as a core and made the spring steel soft overheating it.
Silly you. 😂
Very nice item. tbh, my first thought was that this was an unused backup Sword as bladed weapons in Bronze were very prone to getting badly damaged given the state that other blades have been found in. Blades gdtting chipped and blunted, losing their edge in use, can be pretty bad, even with very good steel, such that if on Deer Culling Contracts, I used to carry 4 skinning knives which could carry mecthrough a day, before sharpening all of them again in the evening with a highbtemperature fired Ruby Ceramic fine Sharpening Stone, , ready for the next morning. You just didn't have enough time to resharpen them during a Working Day. So Having Backup Blades imho has always been important , so favourite one with the most use passed on, while the unused pristine spare got put into the grave ? 🤔✨️✨️✨️
Yeah pobably his sunday best sword......lol.
@@junglie 👍😅✨️✨️✨️
Now imagine how the Men of Stone reacted when the Men of Bronze showed up toting a weapon like this, like bringing a tank to the Battle of Waterloo or something
A piece of art
in a few hours I have to go to try to save save our beloved megalithic mountain.....solar panels.....our village has fought and won many many times against wind turbines and quarries. How many times will they try? Sacred mountain of ridges or Drummau as it is known now. This whole area is a massive mine waste dump. We have had mining, quarrying, Copperopolis, fracking and that mountain is the only place not absolutely covered in filth from these industries. The fracking was a stupid idea, next to hydrothermal fault lines no less, and so we had a very scary earthquake, the noise deafened us and shortly after we had a geyser of orange mine waste destroy a large portion of the village. The theory of evolution was likely discovered there as Alfred Wallace loved our mountain too, though back in those days, this whole area was a diverse natural paradise. We even have a previously thought extinct blue beetle, the man who re-discovered it is very nice indeed. I think that all the villages and towns surrounding this mountain have suffered enough to meet the energy needs of the UK and enough is enough.
Who decided it was a sacred mountain? If it is just a collection of slag heaps as you say.
Every cell in my tiny brain shouts "FAKE!"
It's quite amazing that human bones have lasted over 3000 years in a clay soil like that.
"It's like so many of these things, isn't it? Write your own story." Trust me, Rupert. I am. Welcome to my world! :)
any link to the article?
It very much does look ever fairy-like. It's so beautiful. If you hadn't found it in an actual grave you'd swear it was just made today.
lol, now i gotta think about everyplace named ------field. So many possibilities; maybe he worked or owed a forge. Definitely interesting.
'Gatwick' lol.
Well, bronze age finds from here Sweden is about luxury items. The kind of items you produce when you have everything else covered. So apparently it was a good age here. Sutton hoo is in the later stages of it and ofc in England but we have similar things over here.
This is beautiful.
Wish they made more photos of the sword.
Shouldn't be surprising to find things that look like they are from the Lord of the Rings in Germany. The Lord of the Rings was based on German lore and one of the magic rings is currently on display in Halle.
"The Lord of the Rings was based on German lore" - and a whole bunch of other things from which Tolkien -stole- borrowed. Indeed, the primary motive for LOTR lay in middle eastern religions, not in northern European lore. The languages that Tolkien invented do borrow from northern European languages, for sure, but they also borrow from others.
So this was not the working blade, but the pimp slap accouterment for the maestro... Impressive!
Urnfield culture "name comes from the custom of cremating the dead and placing their ashes in urns, which were buried in fields".
Also:
"The sword was found among a deposit of grave goods and weaponry alongside the remains of a man, a woman and a child. The discovery is extremely rare for this part of Germany as most burial mounds have long been looted [...]"
Conclusion:
The Urnfield culture name come from the custom of burying their dead in graves under mounds. Swords.
Wonder if that Wonderful Short Choppy Sword was the local equivalent of a "barbecue gun"?
hmm this is not an cremation burial - so no urne, so where is the urnefield connection ? i am by the way a little offended as a dane by the claim that the danish swords should be replicas of german swords .. how could you possible prove such a claim ?
Forget about the conspicuous condition, or the bones which are still in tact after 3k years. The hilt of that sword has absolutely no known, contemporary finds which are comparable. Does this not totally re write the known history of this area? I'm only finding videos of people going "wow, look at this" and none raising the obvious questions.
Das Schwert von Vercingetorix?
Such a weapon was probably a status symbol. In the proto-Celtic and on into the Celtic era swords were magical objects owning such a weapon would have made you a great king indeed. think like King Arthur and Excalibur he was mad king because he pulled a magical sword out of a stone although that was not Excalibur that one was given to him by the lady of the lake which shows how in the ancient world swords were huge status symbols.
A single, ancient culture is described as Tumulus, Urnfiled, Beaker, Hallstatt, LaTene, etc. That being Celtic. These weapons were not ceremonial, but likely carried by a young noble who died in battle.
DNA comes back "Rohan"
It's very interesting but it's like watching a radio broadcast.
It's a magical sword!
It's the green glow, right?
A remarkable discovery. But is the discovery of the sword that was buried with the family the most significant tale, or was it the discovery of the family itself? Given the urn jabs, some respect and courtesy for the deceased would have been wonderful.
So you guys are saying there were Tolkien fans amongst the Bronze Age Urnfield People (which people buried urns in fields)?
It looks like the sort of thing you might expect to find in the grave of a hero out of Homer.
not 3000 years old, probably 50 to 200 years old. not bronze but ornamental stone. Its actually ruined by the restaurative team, they removed the pristine green stone.
I admit when I first saw the pics thought it was a hoax as the preservation was so good.
What's wrong with naming cultures after villages?
It's such a delight to every eternal schoolboy to say Wetwang man.
For some reason, urn burials in a field makes me think of the Goodies when they named a horse:
She's black and she's beautiful...let's call her Red Rum.
So I guess we should store all of our precious swords in German soil if we want them to last😊
Formerly owned by a bloke called Frodo.
7:37
Has it got BMW etched into it?
Hi, the chinese found one very similar, even more complex, and of a similar age.
I thought this one was Chinese circa 2022.
When I saw it I thought “hoax” but seemingly not
This is heavenly sword used against Nephilims and demons. Let's say Exalibur, but only heavenly warrior the chosen one can activate him. It's coded sword 😇✋⚜️
Urnfield and Pottree cultures always getting confused. 😅
Maybe its not unused, its just magic.
Nördlingen, to be pronounced like: Nerdlingen
The bodies of a Man, a Woman and a Child; so did all 3 die at the same time? or when he died they said, Well, we don't want you to be alone in the afterlife so we'll send these people with you as you go.
❤
It may have been presented to an 0lder military leader in honor of their exploits. Perhaps they died before using it. Hopefully because there was peace for a time.
My Cousin found a 2ft Dagger in Germany in a quarry pit while swimming it had a Eagle hilt might have been Nazi Officer's they liked to copy Romans 😂😢😮😅
these two guys are so very very English
How about that hammer in coal….250 million years old
If you're talking about the London Hammer, found in London, Texas, it's not in coal. It's in a perfectly natural concretion which can form in various rock types where very liquid or 'muddy' sediments dry out over time. Nothing mysterious about it at all and no more than a couple of hundred years old.
purely fake with only 2 photos all along, it's like being made last year with modern machines, and the bones keeping existing into the wet shallow earth without anything treatment for 3000 yo is ridiculous ❤
Looks fake to me and your not gonna get me believing otherwise
I don't know why you mentioned that game of thrones BS. Well I sort of do, but I have never watched that crap and I do not watch television at all and have not watched it for many many years now (I want nothing to do with that brainwashing BS).