Editor's note: When mentioning the Ming Dynasty Imperial Sword, many people's first reaction is the cross handguard knife unearthed from the Ming Ding Mausoleum, and many friends who are obsessed with swords have grown up watching this restored picture. The cross handguard on this knife is actually rare in China, but it is very popular in the world. This article will talk about the story of the cross handguard sword through the restoration of this knife.
The knife excavation briefing is as follows: (1) Iron knife: long strip, fish belly blade, wooden handle on both sides of the handle, and the shank head is inlaid with gold pieces. The upper trim is decorated with flowing clouds. There is a golden cross handguard at the middle of the handle. The knife has a sheath on the outside, and when it is unearthed, the knife is corroded with the sheath and cannot be peeled off. The knife has been broken into three segments. Sheathed, woody, wrapped in a layer of sandfish skin. Red lacquer. The ridge is inlaid with long strips of gold ornamentation, and two sets of cloud dragon patterns are engraved on it. The end is wrapped in a gold hammer and decorated with a flowing cloud pattern. The sheath and upper part are decorated with four gold hoops. The middle two lanes are narrower and plain. The sheath and the lower part are two wider, with a cloud pattern carved on it, and the ridge of each hoop has a persimmon-shaped ornament and a flat nose, and a ring and ribbon are tied on it. Broken ribbon, width 1 cm. There are also six flat square gold hoops, two with grommets, one gold ring, and one gold hook, which are accessories to the ribbon and are used for hanging. The iron knife is 95 cm long (sheathed) and 4.2 cm wide, and the handguard is 9 cm long and 7 cm wide. Judging from the excavations, the blade of the knife is consistent with the description of the briefing: a slightly curved micro-machete:
Dingling made a restoration for this, restoring a straight handle for this knife.
But is it right to restore it this way? Is the handle of this knife a straight handle or a curved handle? We noticed that the wooden handles of the excavated artifacts had been mutilated, as shown in the figure. So whether the shape of this handle is straight or debatable, let's refer to the situation of other iron knives to analyze.
Looking at the Shandong Provincial Museum exhibiting the iron knife left over from the early Ming Dynasty shipwreck unearthed in the Liangshan area (part 1) compared to the iron knife excavated from the Dingling Tomb (part 2), the author personally believes that it is a type of thing, which may be able to give a reference to the restoration work, right?
Please note the slightly curved handle of the iron knife in the early Ming Dynasty of the Shandong Museum:
Cross hand guards are less common in China and more common in the Western Regions. Let's look at a brief history of the evolution of the cross handguard: the early one-word handguard, the handguard and the sheath cross are only decorative patterns, and the handle type is flat and horizontal. The illustration shows the 4th-century Sassanid swords in the Washington Museum:
6th-century Sui Dynasty swords: collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, excavated in 1929 from the Sui Royal Tomb in Luoyang. Double Capricorn ring head, handguard for a word with cross grid excessive.
The same is true of the Tongguan Sui royal family tomb sarcophagus bezel line carving knife:
The 11th-century Song Li Gonglin (1049-1106) depicts the famous Tang Dynasty general Guo Ziyi Jingyang Zhiyi (without armor) riding alone to meet HuiQi Khan. In order to unite with Hui, Guo Ziyi is single and dressed, calm and generous, and the machete in the waist of The Hui hui general in the picture is also a cross handguard.
The Handguards of the 7th-11th century Turkic one-word handguard either slightly cocked on the left and right sides, taking on a "V" shape, while others were slightly raised in the upper and lower directions, showing a diamond-shaped structure.
Around the 13th century, the cross handguard began to completely replace the one-shaped handguard, which once became the standard form of the sword in the pan-Asian world. The standard cross handguard is equivalent to extending in all four directions, up, down, left and right. The left and right directions are used to protect the fingers when blocking. The top is used to squeeze the sheath to prevent accidental unsheathing. The lower part is used to jam the handle of the knife to protect the hand from loosening or falling off after being violently impacted.
In the Bashang area of Guyuan County, Hebei Province, there is an ancient building. Legend has it that this is the embroidery building where Empress Xiao of the Liao Dynasty dressed up, so it is called the dressing building. Near the dressing building, the archaeological team found that next to the stone pile, a human figure was laid by a user green brick. The archaeological team then decided to dig a 1.5-meter square pit in the middle of the dressing building to thoroughly reveal the secrets hidden in the dressing building, and finally concluded that the dressing building was neither Empress Xiao's dressing building nor a secret passage to the Chahan Brain Palace, but a Yuan Dynasty tomb from the late 13th century to the mid-14th century. Yuan Dynasty knives unearthed from tombs. Its style is similar to the iron knife in the ruins of the early Ming shipwreck in Shandong.
The 13th century, known as the "Mongol Century", was a historical period in which the Mongol Empire continued to conquer Eurasia for decades. Although the culturally backward Mongol conquerors conquered countless ancient civilizations, they also accepted (and to some extent conquered) many advanced cultures. There is both Han Chinese culture, as well as a large number of Islamic cultures and European cultures. This was especially true in terms of weapons, and a large number of Central Asian weapons were adopted by the Mongol army, and this popular cross handguard in the western region also became a major type of Mongolian war knife. Ottoman Empire (957 AD Muslim era) 1550-1551 AD Topkapi Old Palace Museum holds knives:
The Minghui Canon, which was first compiled in the 10th year of Koji (1497), has a clear record of the "cross-hand incident waist knife". Events written in the Qing Dynasty as "ornaments" should be synonymous. The shape of the "cross-hand incident waist knife" should be consistent with the style of the iron knife unearthed in Shandong and the Ming Dynasty in Dingling, with the handle bent down, rather than the spindle shape of the early sword handle style. The legend shows the military bo tibetan hollow iron iron cross handguard:
The following picture is from the knife Turbat waist knife in the "Qing Palace Wubei", which is quite yuanming machete style from the shape of the knife:
Until the 19th century, the cross handguard was still the most common handguard in the Central and Western Asian world, and its handle was curved downward. In Europe, too, in 1801-1802, The British waged a war against France in Egypt, defeating Napoleon, who was then the commander of the French army. During this war, the British army obtained some Shesher-shaped machetes of Egyptian Mamluk cavalry, and they found that islamic swords far superior to their own sabers, and they brought them home to be copied by craftsmen. Led by this fashion, the British army officially introduced the 1831 Mamluk sword in 1831 as a general's sword, equipped with senior British officers with the rank of major general or above.
Although the Mamluk sword was famous, its real popularity on the Battlefield in Europe was short-lived. It was mainly used shortly after the Napoleonic Wars and was basically withdrawn from the battlefield in the mid-19th century. In just a few decades, it can be described as a "flash in the pan". The fundamental reason for this is that the Mamluk sword itself is not suitable for battlefield needs. The cross handguard is a very primitive design that does not provide sufficient protection for the knife holder, and the original European sword has abandoned this design after the 16th century. Traditional Turkic cavalry mostly enter the battlefield with a variety of weapons, and need to quickly switch between sabers, muskets, bows and arrows, hammers, and axes when fighting, so it is reasonable and effective to use simple cross handguards and sacrifice certain protective performance in exchange for flexibility.
This article is the original manuscript of the Cold Weapons Research Institute. The original outline of the editor-in-chief and the author Leng Yan saw, any media or public account without written authorization shall not be reproduced, and the offender will be investigated for legal responsibility.