A rendering of the crystal dagger found on The Ivory Lady from an Iberian Copper Age tomb. I did an extensive write up on my Facebook but I won't bore you with all that here. Update: comments now have the boring
Micron 005 & 02 on A5.
Please share your write up! Sounds really interesting and few people here are going to be going anywhere near Facebook.
I shared it in the other comment reply.
Thanks!
I am from the internet. I'm here to help.
Won't bore us with it? This is the first I've hearing of it and that artifact sounds cool as hell!
Also, gorgeous sketch, really clean line work!
Okay, fine:
In 2007 a copper age burial was found. One of the items discovered there was a 5,000 year old ivory handled crystal dagger. It would quickly become one of the most epic ancient artifacts ever discovered.
Here I have done a drawing of what the full dagger would have looked like based on other daggers of the style from the time.
This dagger was 22 cm (8.6 inches) long. The napped blade bring just 12 mm thick which is remarkable for the length of the crystal blade.
This was the start of the Copper Age and knapping was on the decline at the time. Given the level of skill needed to craft such a blade this invites the possibility that it is older than the burial of which it was part.
There are no local sources for the crystal that was used for the blade. It had to come from some distance away hinting at ancient trade routes. This is also true of the ostrich eggs and elephant tusk that were found in the tomb. Those had to have come from across the Mediterranean.
This dagger was found in the possession of a woman. She has been dubbed “The Ivory Lady." But it wasn't her dagger. About 80 years after she died people re-entered the tomb and placed the dagger and other artifacts with her.
This indicates that she had so grand a reputation that even five generations later people still revered her. A remarkable feat for a woman who was no older than 25 at the time of her death.
Micron 005 & 02 on A5 paper.
I'd like to do more long form posts combined with original art. <Redacted, asked for donations>
Woo hoo! Decidedly not boring! I'm usually content to make a 3D printed part that holds load and fits where it's supposed to, I can't imagine the amount of time and skill it'd take to knap a quartz blade that large and not shatter the whole thing, let alone have the thing hold up over 5000 years.
Any chance you know what the handle is made of? Naively, the pommel kind of makes me think of a jaw bone, but the more I think above it, the more likely I think I'd be carved ivory, which is a whole other set of crazy skills and limited tooling.
Handle is Ivory
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