Falcata vs. Kopis

knightsteel

Sword Smith
Joined
Sep 16, 2002
Messages
143
The following is a presentation of a theory of sword history. It is not to be taken as engraved in stone.

On the sabersmith thread, Mr. Ferrous Wheel posted his Himalayan kopis as a falcata. I believe this to be a commonly perpetuated error, even to be found in several books, such as "Swords and Hilt Weapons".

Somewhere along the history of identifying swords, someone labeled this style wrongly and it stuck. Perhaps much originates with the confusion between the kopis and the machiera. Both were used by the early Greeks.

The true falcata is in the same family of swords as the falchion, fauchion, storta, malchus, and badelaire. All are descendants of the Grecian machiera, which curved back away from the edge and may have some relationship with the seax.

The kopis by contrast recurves towards the edge and is related to the Egyptian kopesh. It's descendants are the khukri and yataghan.

Daniel Watson
 
I Should have mentioned that Himalayan Imports came up with that name. Semantics'll get me in a post everytime:)

I would call it a kopis, meself.

another member of the bent blade family that we're leaving out is the Sica, which was pretty much a 15-20 inch khukuri. Saw use in the Roman Gladiatorial games.

The machiera strikes me as having the swell of the belly that makes it similar to the kopis, but has a much straighter spine.

THanks!

Keith
 
The "sica" was any kind of a curved foreign dagger as far as the Romans were concerned. They called the Jewish terrorists who used these daggers, which they carried concealed under thir clothes, to assassinate their enemies in large crowds, walking off and leving the dagger in the victim, "sicarii" or, singular, "sicarius".* It was considered a "dishonorable" weapon that no true Roman would carry, at least no true Roman Patrician.

The weapon as used in the Games is a bit of a mystery as we have never found a real one. We have found what appears to be a wooden practice version and we have many depictions in art, but no examples. From the depictions, it appears that it curved sharply upwards, almost at a right angle, and must have been used, not to slash or chop as the falcata, khukri, kpis, etc., were but to stab up under the ribcage and into the heart. We do not know for certain just where and how they were sharpened. For further details, I would refer you to long discussions of the Games and of the sica in the Ancient Weapons Forum of SwordForum.com, where John Maddox Roberts and Peter Morwood, both published authors on Rome, as well as Quintus, Matthew Amt of Legio XX, have posted extensively on the subject.

* BTW, "Sicarius" in Aramaic, the language used locally in Judaea during the time of Jesus, was "Iscariot", which puts an interesting slant on Judas Iscariot, at least for me.
 
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