It is a special copy: a sword that has been bent in several places. The sword was sacrificed in the peat thousands of years ago and is now in the display of the Drents Museum in Assen.
We are talking about the sword of Echten. During excavation work in 2017, the object was found in the valley of the old deep at Echten. The sword shows that it was already broken before it ended up in the peat, explains Archeology Irini Biezeveld of the Drents Museum. “If the sword had broken due to the tribulation of the peat, the sword would have broken. This is consciously bent in three places by heating.”
A special find, because something similar has not been found in Drenthe. “We do know that in other places in the Netherlands there were objects that were deliberately destroyed and then laid in the ground. That happened about 3500 years ago. The sword of Echten is special, because it is the only Drenthe object that we know that deliberately has been bent before it has been sacrificed,” says Biezeveld.