The Mycenaean pictorial daggers: patina and inlay

Abstract

Recent laboratory analysis of several of the celebrated Mycenaean daggers from Bronze Age Greece has raised the possibility that the black material in the pictorial designs is a black patinated bronze, not the black inlaid sulphide paste known as ‘niello’ that has traditionally been thought to be a hallmark of these weapons. The identity of the black material is important because it is a key factor in the scholarly search for the origins and migration of exotic metallurgy around the eastern Mediterranean in the second millennium BC. This paper critiques the laboratory analyses that have been performed over the last 15 years on Bronze Age Aegean daggers, calling into question the recent implications that the black material in all these daggers is black patinated bronze essentially identical with Japanese shakudo. My critique, supported by newly reported analyses of other ancient black inlaid objects, reopens the possibility that Mycenaean craftsmen were skilled in producing and working with both forms of black surfaces: patinated bronze and inlaid niello.