Ornamentation of Weapons

As a glance at any book about Celtic art will show, weapons are among the most highly decorated objects of Iron Age Europe. Military equipment in many cultural contexts is associated with ornament, in the modern world as well as the ancient, and military activity is often highly ritualised.

In the Early Iron Age sword hilts are sometimes decorated with ivory and gold, and both the scabbards and hilts of daggers sometimes bear inlay of coral. In ‘Scythian' burial practices of eastern Europe, swords and other weapons are often elaborately decorated with gold, sometimes with figural imagery, as in the case of the objects from Filippovka cited above. In the Late Iron Age, from about 450 bce onwards, sword scabbards bear a range of different kinds of ornament. Some, such as many in the assemblage from the site of La Tene in Switzerland, have incised relief at the top of the scabbard, where the decoration would be readily visible. Many sword-blades from all over Europe have signs stamped into the tops of the blade that have been made with a hardened iron die.^[293] Some scabbards of the Early La Tene period bear complex figural ornament or curvilinear patterns incised into the sur­face. In later periods stamped ornament was often applied to scabbards.

Shields and helmets are among the most ornate objects from Iron Age Europe. The bronze Battersea Shield, for example, thought to date to around 100 bce, bears complex three-dimensional ornamentation of circles and spirals, with red enamel inlay. A shield from the River Witham near Lincoln also has elaborate three-dimensional ornament of circles, along with palmettes and other forms, as well as fine spirals of incised lines. The bronze helmet from the Thames near Waterloo Bridge has two conical ‘horns' as well as complex relief patterns of lines and circles.^[294]