Sources for gladius hilt materials

[Crispvs]

"Then , take a look at the guard of the mogontiagum (the first sword in your post), and precisely take a look at the hole of the guard to insert the tang and then to the width of the bottom of the tang . Sounds strange."

It is indeed a museum assemblage of seperately found parts. They are all from Vindonissa.

"As you can see in all the pics of this topic , none grip has octagonal or esagonal shape, but that's is straight (or althought I think so for my experience) because is highly difficult , almost impossible, find a bone good to make a similar shape. I don't think that an armorer had so much time to check hundred of bones before make one sword."

Actually, the vast majority of Roman sword grips which have been found have been either octagonal or hexagonal in section. Also, it is very easy to find the right bone once you know what you are looking for. The best bone for a sword grip is the rear cannon bone of a calf - hardly an uncommon animal to be found in an ancient abbatoir. Once you can recognise it finding the right bone is child's play, even today. The time to make a grip is not great either, once you know what you are doing. Once the bone had been cut to the right size, it took me nearly an hour to cut and file the ridges and recesses on the first side of mine. After that however, the other sides each took about 5 minutes to do.

Here's a picture of mine, also showing that if you know what to look for you can find the right bones for any part of a sword hilt



"At last i think the big part of the gladii had handle from wood and only sporadically from bone, because to work wood you need very very time less than the bone, and all at once a lot of available material.
But of course wood can't survive."

Actually, wood does survive in many places and Vindonissa, for example, has produced a number of wooden guards and pommels, along with bone guards and possibly pommels and a large number of bone grips. I think that there was one wooden grip amongst the grips from Vindonissa.

Crispvs