dory

[Paullus Scipio]

A good simple explanation, but one that places a great deal of trust on iconography. Paul, are you turning into D'Amato? :lol:
Very droll John! :lol: Well, unfortunately we have very little BUT iconography to go on - and the distance between spearhead and butt occasionally found in tombs - which isn't always helpful if the weapon has been either ritually 'killed' or simply broken to fit the tomb/grave!! ....And what, pray, is wrong with a possible 'simple' explanation? Are you a great doubter of the "Occam's razor" principle? ( which of course doesn't always hold true :wink: )

I appreciate the artist could sometimes get a great deal of detail into a piece of work, but sometimes he must have lacked the capacity or the required space etc.. The artist doing the relief of Panaitios at least had a good deal of surface to work with to show the 3m long tapered weapon. But laying the aside the intepretation of iconography.......
Phew !! .....glad of that, because 'interpreting' the iconography is fraught with difficulties, beginning with that favourite, the artist got it wrong, or was using artistic licence etc, which unless supported by something else, I'm always inclined to take with a pinch of salt....

You seem to be suggesting the development of tapered spearshafts go hand in hand with coppicing starting in the 5th century? Really? Did no body use coppicing until then? Where not spears used in great numbers before then? Hmmmm.......
Oh, dear, not at all! Coppicing goes back to neolithic times ( there is evidence in England from 3,000 BC!!) and appears to have been widespread in ancient Greece. It's main purpose seems to have been, as elsewhere, to provide charcoal ( and also many other things) and the type of wood most commonly coppiced Europe-wide was Ash - said to be ideal for spear-shafts and poles generally. My point was simply that whilst some of these, cut from billets, would be parallel sided, others, particularly those harvested 'early' from younger sprouts in times of military emergency, would have a slight natural taper, and it would be a short leap from that to deliberate use of tapered shafts - but WHEN that occurred one cannot say, perhaps Mycenaean times or before.....OTOH, in ancient cultures the 'rightness' of an object tends to inhibit change or innovation - for example features of the Illyrian helmet such as the parallel ridges over the skull were continued long after their original purpose ( to re-inforce the cranial centreline join when the helmets were originally made in parts) had disappeared and one-piece helmets were the norm - so perhaps it was not until quite late that tapered spears became acceptable practice......

I think I would suggest that if I was to stand face to face to someone, largely covered in "copper-alloy", I would want a heavy short spear I would need to hold at the balance point. If I was engaged in a more flexible style of warfare, sometimes facing cavalry, I would want a longer more responsive weapon. A simple case of form dictating function. No more than that. Certainly an explanation not reliant on the development of coppicing or artistic interpretation.
....And with this I would whole-heartedly agree ( or as a cavalryman might put it; "Horses for courses" :wink: ) - factors such as shield or armour penetration would favour a heavy, stiff, parallel sided shaft for strength - which is what the 'Dory/Great spear' has - but not shortness, for it seems to have had the longest non-tapered length practical for a man on foot to wield....; but reach, relative lightness and 'pointability' might make a tapered 'kamax' more suitable for a horseman.
[ digression: as a young man in army service I joined a display tent-pegging team, and had no difficulty in accurately pointing a non-tapered 9 ft lance shaft, probably because being held in the middle it was relatively short and hence little 'wobble' factor, ( we also used sabres) and a miss was a rarity, but I wouldn't fancy my chances against another horseman armed with a 'kamax'].

I don't think it is co-incidence that we only see the 'kamax' and tapered spears generally depicted after the second half of the 5 C BC introduction of true cavalry into southern Greece