Early swords stayed short because long bronze blades simply bent
For centuries, sword makers could not make a practical blade much longer than 60 centimetres. The problem was physics: bronze is not stiff enough, so longer blades flexed and bent. The oldest swords, found at Arslantepe in Turkey and dated to about 3300 BC, were arsenical bronze and some were inlaid with silver.
Swords grew out of daggers during the Bronze Age, around 3000 BC, as smiths cast copper and bronze into long leaf-shaped blades with hilts formed from an extension of the blade. Among the longest-lived European types was the Naue II, or grip-tongue sword, which appeared in northern Italy around the thirteenth century BC and was exported as far as Ugarit by about 1200 BC, shortly before the palace cultures of the Bronze Age collapsed. Most measured 60 to 70 centimetres, the largest about 85.
Chinese bronze swords date back to the Shang dynasty and peaked during the Warring States and Qin periods, when some smiths cast hard high-tin edges over softer cores. Early copper swords also turn up at Indus Valley sites. Iron became common from the thirteenth century BC, but because it was hardened by hammering rather than quenching, early iron blades were barely stronger than bronze and could still bend in use.
High-carbon steel, later known as Damascus steel, probably emerged in India around the middle of the first millennium BC, and Indian swords were shipped to Greece and Persia. The Greek xiphos and Roman gladius were about 60 to 70 centimetres long, while some late Sassanian blades approached a metre. The late Roman spatha, whose bearer's title became a court rank in Constantinople, led eventually to the medieval arming sword with its crossguard. In many late Iron Age graves, swords were bent double, a practice called killing the sword.
In the early modern period Western designs split in two. Light, straight rapiers and smallswords were built for quick thrusts in duels, giving rise to a style close to modern fencing. Heavier curved sabres and cutlasses served soldiers and cavalry, lingering into the twentieth century; a US Navy cutlass from 1917 stayed in the armoury into World War II.
Source: Sword
