A nearly 3,000-year-old dagger has been discovered embedded in clay from a fallen section of cliff on Poland’s Baltic coastline.
The ornately decorated knife from the Hallstatt period—an era known for its advanced metalworking—was found on Sunday by members of the St. Cordula Association for the Saving of Monuments.
The president of the association, Jacek Ukowski, said: “This is my most valuable discovery. Accidental. The cliff was torn off; the block must have fallen from above. I entered this place with a metal detector because it started to ring there.”
The weapon is some 2,800 years old, dating it back to the early Iron Age, and has elaborate decoration along the 24.2 cm length of the handle and blade, Polish news website Interia reported.
The dagger has been donated to the Museum of the History of Kamień Land in northwestern Poland.
“A true work of art! In terms of workmanship, it is of very high quality, beautifully ornamented. Each engraved element is different,” said Grzegorz Kurka, the museum’s director. “As for finds in Poland, I have not come across such a dagger.”
The discovery was made on the western part of the Polish coast but Kurka said he could not reveal the exact location.
Solar cult?
“The blade is covered with linear crescents and crosses resembling stars. In the middle of the blade runs a decoration perhaps symbolizing constellations, and the whole [piece] is complemented by diagonal lines,” Kurka wrote on social media.
He said that the decorations may indicate links with a solar cult and suggest that the dagger had ritual significance. It could also have belonged to a wealthy warrior. Whatever the case, the craftsmanship indicates a high level of skill in metallurgy, Kurka noted.
“It may be an import and cast in one of the workshops in southern Europe,” he said.
“The discovery of this dagger is also a testimony to the extraordinary history of the region and Western Pomerania over thousands of years,” he added.
