Friday, February 11, 2011

Iron Age war-hammer from Hungary

Salve,
effigies of horses in nomadic and ancient art are always wonderful to behold. My favorites are the remains of the  Eurasian steppes art from I millennium  BCE (from the steppe kurgans), artifacts belonging to the so called Animal Style, especially from the first part of that millennium when it was relatively free from Greek art  influence in the West, and influencing Chinese art in the East.
But as I am preparing some Hallstatt culture warriors on horseback  I came across this image of  iron war hammer head,  a horse head with its neck worked into a war-hammer head, and I think this artifact is simply beautiful (I have several other drawings of similar artifacts - axes and war-hammers). I decided to do a quick sketch.
ps
Could someone point me to a good book on the Iberian and  Celtiberian warriors and their horses, and the ancient horse tack in the Iberian Peninsula - Spanish or English? I have several drawings of Iberian warriors but I want to learn more, and I downloaded some articles from la revista  Gladius  http://gladius.revistas.csic.es/index.php/gladius
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2 comments:

  1. JanFebruary 11, 2011 at 3:10 AM

    That's beautiful!

    About Celtiberians and Iberians, I can't recommend any books as I've only read a couple.

    But their horses are an interesting topic - there's that whole issue with interpretation of vase paintings as mail armour on the horses, in not entirely-plausible ways.

    I'll be looking forward to seeing what you do with them. :)

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  2. Dario T. W.February 12, 2011 at 1:25 AM

    Thanks Jan,
    I have the Osprey books on Celtiberians and Punic Wars. I was able to find some interesting articles from ''Gladius'' (in Spanish) and from this site http://www4.uwm.edu/celtic/ekeltoi/
    In one of the articles there was a very nice sculpture showing details of a horse caparison (shabraque - czaprak) and way of attaching a girth. I think I am going to ask Angel http://angelgpinto.blogspot.com/ about some of them. We shall see, I suppose.
    On the other hand I found some nice horse tack of Hallstatt period form Slovenia, along with images embossed on fragments of wide metal belts from Austria, Slovenia and Italy... makes me very eager to put them together, but more research is needed.

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