Mysterious 5,000-year-old sword discovered in Venetian monastery

A doctoral student in Italy discovered an ancient 5,000-year-old sword in a Venetian monastery.

The student, Vittoria Dall’Armellina, was visiting the San Lazzaro degli Armeni Museum on an island in the Venetian lagoon when she spotted a small sword in a display cabinet among a number of medieval items.

LiveScience reports that when Dall’Armellina spotted the sword in 2017 she was a doctoral student at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.

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Dall’Armellina confirmed that the sword had never been recorded in the museum’s catalog of Near East ancient objects and conducted further research on the weapon. This confirmed her suspicions that the sword was thousands of years old. “The sword doesn’t just resemble the most ancient weapons in the world, but it was also forged around the same time, around the year 3000 B.C.,” explained the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in a statement.

Dall’Armellina had studied swords in the ancient Near East extensively, and thought that the weapon looked much older than the medieval period. The sword looked similar to 5,000-year-old weapons found in the ancient Royal Palace of Arslantepe, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in what is now Turkey.

The island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni is home to a monastery of Mekhitarists, or Armenian Catholic monks. Dall’Armellina worked with Father Serafino Jamourlian, who searched the museum’s archives to find that the sword came from to Venice from Trabzon in Turkey during the second half of the 19th century.

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Metal analysis of the sword was conducted by Ivana Angelini, a professor at the University of Padua in Italy, and the CIBA archaeological research center.