Cruisader sword found in Isreal

[fernando]

Great find. Thanks for sharing the info, Andreas .

[Victrix]

Everyone’s dream

[fernando]

Let us see how it looks, after being stripped from all that incrustation.

[Ian]

Originally Posted by fernando

Let us see how it looks, after being stripped from all that incrustation.

Perhaps not very much left. That's a long time under water. Preliminary x-ray studies would show some details before trying to uncover (and maybe destroying) what's left of the original sword.

[fernando]

So what we have is somehow a 'would be' sword. However in one of the articles they say that it will be displayed to the public 'after being cleaned'.
Have i heard that bronze is easier to recover than iron ...

[Jim McDougall]

It will be fascinating to follow the conservation of this sword, which will of course take some time if done properly. Like most artifacts recovered from shipwrecks, they must be kept in tanks with very gradual removal of concretions. What has preserved the iron within (hopefully) is that concretion which has sealed it away from oxygen, which is necessary for the corrosive process. Often in these cases the object encased will either disintegrate or possibly have already gone, with its impression cast in the concreted material.

There have been relatively few crusades period swords found in situ, and I think the last I ever heard of was Artzi's around 2008.
Most others known were held in arsenals, and sadly there were enormous numbers scrapped in the years after the crusades.

Interestingly during the late 18th into 19th century, many swords of these periods were piled into surplus stores and many were dispersed, through Malta, into North Africa. There was a time when many of these turned up on native swords in the Sahara and in the 19th century in the Sudan, but those have pretty much been collected up (Briggs, 1965).

[fernando]

Originally Posted by Jim McDougall

... Like most artifacts recovered from shipwrecks, they must be kept in tanks with very gradual removal of concretions. What has preserved the iron within (hopefully) is that concretion which has sealed it away from oxygen, which is necessary for the corrosive process. Often in these cases the object encased will either disintegrate or possibly have already gone, with its impression cast in the concreted material...

Well put, Jim. Diverting a bit, a friend of mine and his group of amateur divers found a few years ago a couple cannons and an anchor in an underwater place nearby, having only recovered the one bronze cannon and leaving behind the iron one and the anchor. They realized they didn't have the know how and the means to recover the iron pieces without risk of desintegration. I think the two items still reside in the same (rocky) place, some 200 yards from the shore.
On the other hand this cruzader sword looks to be well encapsulated by a dense layer of crustaceans; and will be handled by experts ... assuming inside such capsule there is a real sword .