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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

My name is Robert Lamb.

And I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two in our series on sacred daggers.

In the last episode, we talked a bit about the role of daggers beyond your average D&D campaign, how they figure into history, how they often have cultural significance beyond their simple use as weapons.

And then we looked at a couple of specific artifacts.

Rob, you talked about the rock crystal dagger of the ivory lady.

Wonderful sequence of words there.

A fascinating blade found in the grave of a woman in modern day Spain who died and was buried during the Iberian

Copper Age, which would have been roughly 3,200 to 2,200 BCE. This dagger was interesting for a number

of reasons, not least of which, because of its beautiful, semi-transparent rock crystal blade,

is a blade you can kind of see through, and for its inclusion as

part of an assemblage of grave goods indicating that the woman buried there was probably a figure

of great importance and authority. And then we also talked about the bush barrow dagger, a famous

bronze age masterwork knife found in a barrow grave about a kilometer away from Stonehenge.

You can kind of see Stonehenge from this barrow.

And that one was notable because it also came with a particularly rich and interesting collection of other grave goods,

but also because of the almost unbelievable level of craft that went into its manufacture, particularly

the way the handle had been decorated with around 140,000 microscopic gold pins, each no

wider than a human hair, made at a time before magnifying glasses, leading some researchers

to speculate that it really could

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