Copper
2.300-1.800 BC
Girona (Gironès)
The halberd blade in the Archaeological Museum of Girona is an exceptional piece due to its chronological and cultural significance, its state of conservation and its rarity. It was found in 1930 when the foundations of a house at No. 26 Joan Maragall Street in Girona were being laid.
It is a metal blade with a general lozenge shape made up of two very unequal triangles. The largest, the halberd blade itself, is elongated, reinforced with a thick central nerve and has a rounded section that reaches almost to the tip. The opposite triangle, flatter, smaller and shorter, is the tongue used to fix the blade to the shaft. That is why it has three holes for nails or rivets, two of which have been preserved. It is 24.3 cm long and has a maximum width of 7 cm. The nails are 1.8 cm thick.
It is made of copper with small proportions of arsenic, silver and lead. The nails are also made of copper containing antimony and tin instead of arsenic. The blade was made by pouring the liquid metal into a mould and finishing it off with cold or hot forging. The nails were made separately with ore from another smelting.
The prehistoric halberd consisted of a simple elongated metal triangle nailed to a short staff. It was an offensive weapon designed to strike and stab and could be wielded with one or two hands. The earliest blades were flat, while later a central nerve was added as reinforcement. The pole was normally made of wood, about a metre long, although metal ones have also been found in Northern and Central Europe.
Metal blades like ours are interpreted as belonging to halberds, although it is not always easy to distinguish them from dagger blades. The latter were also triangular, wide and fixed to a handle with rivets, although in this case longitudinal in shape. The halberd blades were placed at a slightly acute angle to the stem and therefore, as in the Girona example, the rivet holes are not symmetrical.
The halberd was a characteristic weapon in the Early and Middle Bronze Ages and is found throughout Europe. It can also be seen in rock carvings from the Nordic countries to the Atlas Mountains and the Sahara, in Galician petroglyphs and in the Alps. Depending on the place, the blade, the whole halberd or the figures holding it in their hands are depicted.
In addition to being an offensive weapon, it was also a symbolic object that indicated the social category of the person who possessed it, as is the case today with certain military bodies that carry halberds in an ornamental display of symbolism.
On the Iberian Peninsula they had an important presence in the Argar civilisation (2200-1550 BC), which spread across eastern Andalusia, Murcia and Alicante. They are found in tombs, where they indicate that the person buried was a warrior. In the rest of Iberia they are usually isolated finds. This halberd is the only one found in Catalonia.
The shape of the Girona blade corresponds to that of the Atlantic-type halberds. Although it is made of copper and not bronze, its shape is more in keeping with the Early Bronze Age (230-1850 BC) than the Chalcolithic.
The mediaeval and modern halberd was very different. It was used for punching and cutting and the shaft was about two metres long with a kind of axe on the side and a point at the end. It empowered the infantry units that carried it, as it allowed them to deal with cavalry. Some were very ostentatious and only served, as in prehistory, as a prestige weapon. This function is still used by the halberdiers of the Spanish Royal Guard or the Swiss Guard at the Vatican.
Narcís Soler
