What do you know about axes? (17 photos)

Tlinglit stone axe, Alaska.

The ax - if we consider an ax to be a two-part tool, a chopping blade attached perpendicular to the handle, and not just a stone chopper - is about 30 thousand years old. Connecting the two elements was a challenging engineering task. In principle, they knew how to make holes in stone, but such a technique sharply increased the thickness of the stone “blade” and the “sharpening angle” and immediately turned the supposed ax into a cleaver or hammer, at best an “adze” that did not cut wood fibers, but crushed them. Therefore, a real ax was not mounted on an ax handle, but, on the contrary, inserted into it and tied together with animal sinews or strips of leather.

The design is relatively fragile, so as soon as people learned to forge and melt metals, in some places they began to make copper ... axes, and “blades” continued to be made from stone in the old fashioned way, they were more effective - chips of flint or obsidian have extreme sharpness, inaccessible to copper plate. However, the metal tip, although less sharp, was also less fragile than the stone one, and most importantly, “reusable” - sharpening the copper again is much easier than making a new stone chopper and re-attaching it to the handle. These considerations gave rise to a more “correct” ax – a metal one on a wooden ax handle. At first, such products were stupidly copied in shape by stone analogues (above):

Little by little, they began to make the metal blade wider, and then they decided to forge it from an iron plate, which was bent in half while hot, leaving an eyelet hole in the place of the bend - it became possible to insert the ax into the blade, and not vice versa. This made it possible to experiment with the shape depending on the purpose of a particular ax and at about the same time - simultaneously with the spread of technology - the ax among different peoples firmly and for a long time took its place among the types of edged weapons, primarily as an indispensable means for piercing armor. This item combines a club and a blade. And most importantly, the ax was cheap and did not require complex iron processing technology - the quality of the steel did not play such a role as in the manufacture of swords.

From this moment on, you can talk for a long time (or rather, write a thick book) about its further evolution and classification, speculate about the advantages of the reed over the halberd... but you need to limit yourself somehow. Such books were written a long time ago, and resources devoted to various kinds of historical reconstructions are filled with excerpts from them.

Let's take only one line of development - the Western European one-handed battle axe. His fate is interesting.

When the expanding Roman Empire came into serious contact with the Frankish tribes, their favorite weapon was the famous Francis:

These hatchets already had a perfect, time-tested shape and were used both in close combat - Frankish warriors were known for their ability to cut off limbs and cut skulls - and as a kind of artillery. Before the two armies converged shield to shield, a full-fledged salvo awaited the enemy. Rotating axes, crashing into the ranks of the enemy, struck and maimed, broke the formation, stunned with blows of axes and butts... The Romans, for their part, were no fools themselves to abandon pilums before hand-to-hand combat. These were some kind of darts... but let's not get distracted.

Francis. The ax was the symbol of the Fransian warrior. He never parted with it during his lifetime and went to the grave with it - it was placed on the feet of the deceased.

With the development of chivalry (read: improvement and heavier armor), the ax became the second weapon after the sword. Its forms varied. By the 15th century, the main type of European battle ax had become a one-handed ax with a practical L-shape on a straight, often metal handle. Its weight was on average 1.2 kg, and its length was 80-90 cm. On the butt there was a spike-punch, a hook, or most often a coin.

Bottom: An interesting type of ax – the valashka – developed in the Carpathian region. It had a very small blade, about 7 cm long, and a miniature butt and served as both an ax and a cane. It can be manipulated almost like a stick. Wallachka was both a weapon of local bandits and, as in other regions, a symbol of dignity and wealth. Such axes were often inlaid, decorated with carvings and precious metals.

By the 16th century, with the spread of firearms, the battle ax began to degenerate - it became an honorary, ceremonial weapon, or, even worse, it was equipped with various cunning devices, such as a hidden dagger on a spring in the handle, which flew out when shaken. The crown of such invention was the cricket - a hybrid of an ax and a pistol, the barrel of which was located at the end, near the blade, and the ax itself served as the barrel and handle.

Such mutants spread widely in the second half of the 16th century, and by the 17th century, the one-handed battle ax as a weapon in Western Europe had safely died out, but by that time European blacksmiths had found a new large market...