The first obvious weapons were stones, roughly shaped to make them more effective. Such are not to be found in the City Art Museum, but we do have examples of the next type to develop, the weapons of the bronze age.
Bronze is a mixture of copper and tin, and it was invented a very long time ago, and in many different places. It was known in ancient Egypt, in the Far East and in Europe. Two thousand years before Christ the Chinese were making bronze arms and domestic and ceremonial objects of all sorts, and were making them so beautiful that such objects are considered proper exhibits for an art museum. We have a very fine collection of ancient Chinese bronzes, exhibited in the Museum’s Chinese galleries, and among them are numerous weapons. The earliest include axes and dagger-axes ([Fig. 1]). These date from the Shang Dynasty, (ca. 1523-ca. 1028 B.C.) This too is the period of a bronze helmet ([Fig. 2]) in the form of a hood with smooth sides which come down well over the cheeks, while leaving the front of the face exposed. Helmets of almost precisely this form, but made of steel, were worn in Italy in the fifteenth century, more than two thousand years later! This helmet has a small plume-holder at its very top, and is peculiar in having, as its only decoration, a pair of eyes embossed in relief on the forehead.
Fig. 1. A Chinese bronze axe more than 3000 years old, with a crouching monster in relief.
From the Ordos region of Siberia, where a primitive culture lasted for a very long time, comes a particularly fine ceremonial dagger ([Fig. 3]) of bronze with inlays of turquoise. From China again, dating throughout the thousand years before Christ, come numerous bronze weapons now in the Museum’s Study Collection, including swords, daggers, and, from about the beginning of the Christian Era, most ingenious mechanisms for the crossbow ([Fig. 4]) a weapon which was not known in Europe until many centuries later.
An Etruscan grave has yielded the large bronze disk of [Fig. 5]. On stylistic grounds it is believed that this originated not in Etruria, but on the other, Eastern, shore of Italy in Picenum, in the second half of the seventh century before Christ. It was probably the central reinforcement of a large leather shield.
Fig. 2. A bronze helmet as old as the axe in [Fig. 1], but in form closely resembling Italian steel helmets of the fifteenth century.
Fig. 3. The thin flat-bladed ceremonial bronze dagger of a shaman or sorcerer from the steppes of Siberia.