Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of Ancient Warfare Answers. I'm Murray, the assistant editor of

of Ancient Warfare magazine, and I'm going to be answering a question from one of our viewers

slash listeners slash listeners. In a minute, you can, of course, ask us a question, as you know.

And so you can send us a message, you can send us an email. You can back us on Patreon,

www.com forward slash ancient warfare podcast. You can back us at the level of legionary,

Optio or Centurion. And we will do our best to answer any questions you have so that

you have your fix for the week of ancient warfare now the question we've got uh this time round

is about national weapons uh were nations named after weapons or vice versa a notional chicken

and egg question here about national weapons.

Certain tribal confederations like the Franks and Saxons typically bear namesake weapons, such as the Francisco and the Saxes.

Is the name of the weapon thought to be derived from the name of the Confederation?

Or is the name of the Confederation derived from the weapon right so

I'm going to say that we don't know and then I'm going to try and give a much more definitive

answer because I think we can argue in a couple of cases what knowledge we have but then in a couple of others it's like well that's not possibly

able to be known so especially with the francisco or the francesca and the the sacks or the sacks

we have weapons which are the weapons of a particular tribe and obviously seem to look like the name of the tribe.

So the Franks used the Franciscar and the Saxons used the Cax.

The Francisco is, of course, an axe, generally a throwing axe.

And the CX is a single bladed

knife or dagger

normally with a single blade, sorry, a single-edged blade

rather than a double-edged blade.

...