CT scans of a sixteenth century sword from Jena in Germany have revealed a reputation engraved on the blade, hidden by a thick encrustation of rust. The inscription reads “Clemes Stam,” the title of the Solingen swordsmith who made it.
The blade was certainly one of 4 surviving swords interred within the graves of the Collegiate Church in Jena the place school, college students and their households had been buried in crypts between the late sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The church was destroyed by an allied bomb on the finish of World Struggle II, and the 4 swords had been recovered from the rubble.
For seven years, researchers on the College of Jena have been analyzing the objects recovered from the Collegiate Church. Archaeologist Enrico Paust suspected there may be an inscription, however didn’t have the expertise to penetrate the heavy corrosion layer to see inside to the blade, which is bigger than the standard pattern. He enlisted the help of industrial analysis establishment INNOVENT e.V. to nearly break by means of the barrier.
The “EasyTom 150-160 X-Ray Micro& Nano-CT” computed tomography scanner from the French producer RX Options, accessible at INNOVENT because the finish of 2022, represents a very good compromise between pattern dimension and determination.
On the one hand, comparatively massive samples as much as 70 cm in peak might be measured; then again, a comparatively excessive decision (voxel dimension <1 μm) is feasible, as is critical, for instance, for inspecting circuits.
The rapier did certainly match into the pattern chamber, elevating hopes that the rapier may very well be “nearly” “unwrapped” from the corrosion layer and a possible inscription revealed.
The scan was capable of peel again the encrustations in layers, first revealing the stays of a sheath on the blade. Underneath the sheath, imaging revealed proof that the blade had been manufactured by welding various kinds of metal collectively. The inscription was then inlaid into the blade metal with individually crafted letters product of copper sheeting simply 0.6 mm thick.
Comparable weapons from the interval 1580 to 1620 might be discovered within the German Blade Museum in Solingen. Weapons of this sort might and had been solely permitted to be carried by members of the higher class. The Solingen workshop equipped the European excessive the Aristocracy with unique weapons and in addition crafted weapons for the Spanish king. The Jena rapier stands out from weapons with stamped inscriptions resulting from its elaborate inlay work.
Such a rapier in Jena might solely have belonged to a rector or a scholar of noble delivery.
