Some Sarauter revisionism

[Archelaos]

Archelaos wrote:

Actually there is no way to tell if this sauroter is from hoplite spear or sarisa. It is quite long, and if you check in Angriffswaffen aus Olympia you will find only three similar, all of them much shorter than Newcastle example.

....actually, undoubted 'Dory Sauroters' vary enormously in size - from 12-20 inches (0.3-0.5 m), so the Macedonian example is not particularly large, and it is of the 'dory' type, lacking the ' wings' found on what are presumed to be sarissa butts found in tombs - one example being 18 inches(0.445 m) long and weighing over a kilogram (1070 g) !

The Newcastle example therefore is almost certainly from a 'dory'.........

I highlighted the problematic words Actually there is not a single proof that "winged" butt spike is from sarisa except Andronikos's wishful thinking. His article from 1970 (in BCH) started all this, but I am almost sure that he was wrong. He described 51cm, 1300g spearhead, 44.5cm,1070g butt spike, 27cm spearhead and iron tube from psi tumulus in Vergina and assumed that big pieces and tube were from sarisa just because "big spear needs big head and butt"! Later Markle made such reconstruction, but never shown it to public (in infantry use). Why? Well, Connolly made his reconstruction and found out that you almost can't raise such heavy head off the ground. He suggested "winged" butt and small head and it seemed a great theory. But small head look exactly like heads of hunting spears in Macedonian art and there is evidence that "big pieces" were together pieces of 2m long spear, possibly parade one (Sekunda Sarissa in Acta Universitatis Lodziensis Folia Archaeologica, no.23, v.1, p.13-41). I found quite a few arguments for this hypothesis, but I still wait for publication of my conference paper.

So if winged butt is not from sarisa then Newcastle example may be the right one. Or maybe sarisa had no butt... Though some (very) late sources claim it had butt...

Newcastle butt is quite atypical, there are only 3 roughly similar examples from Olympia and possibly they appear on some Beotian stellai (black ones with very shallow relief lines).

Edit: On lead weights. I believe that those could have been separated and misinterpreted. Without seeing Athens example I will interpret is as loom weight, fishing weight etc. and I think if found alone every archaeologist would interpret it such.