08-24-2005, 07:04 AM
Avete omnes,
I don't know whether this theme has been treated on this forum before but I found it worth to be mentioned here.
Last sunday I saw a documentation on German TV about the gladiatorial cemetery at Ephesus, discovered already in 1993 and unearthed by Austrian archaeologists. They found beside some interesting tumbstones ('in situ') the bones of about 70 individuals.
On a thigh bone, scarcely above the knee, there was a strange wound, consisting of 4 squarely arranged puncture holes. After long investigation the archaeologists found an obviously well-known gravestone that showed something that up to then had been regarded as a cult object:
![[Image: quadrens1.jpg]](http://people.freenet.de/u-bahr/quadrens1.jpg)
My apologies for the bad image quality - I photographed it immediately from the TV screen. The stone shows a retiarius with trident and dagger in his left and the unknown object in his right hand instead of the fishnet. The gladius-like object obviously had several thin points instead of a blade. The archaeologists compared the holes in the thigh bone with the depicted object and reconstructed a weapon that they called quadrens.
![[Image: quadrens3.jpg]](http://people.freenet.de/u-bahr/quadrens3.jpg)
Has this weapon called quadrens been known from literal sources, has anybody in this forum heard about it before or is it a modern expression as we use it for example for the lorica segmentata?
Greets - Uwe
I don't know whether this theme has been treated on this forum before but I found it worth to be mentioned here.
Last sunday I saw a documentation on German TV about the gladiatorial cemetery at Ephesus, discovered already in 1993 and unearthed by Austrian archaeologists. They found beside some interesting tumbstones ('in situ') the bones of about 70 individuals.
On a thigh bone, scarcely above the knee, there was a strange wound, consisting of 4 squarely arranged puncture holes. After long investigation the archaeologists found an obviously well-known gravestone that showed something that up to then had been regarded as a cult object:
My apologies for the bad image quality - I photographed it immediately from the TV screen. The stone shows a retiarius with trident and dagger in his left and the unknown object in his right hand instead of the fishnet. The gladius-like object obviously had several thin points instead of a blade. The archaeologists compared the holes in the thigh bone with the depicted object and reconstructed a weapon that they called quadrens.
Has this weapon called quadrens been known from literal sources, has anybody in this forum heard about it before or is it a modern expression as we use it for example for the lorica segmentata?
Greets - Uwe
Greets - Uwe
