this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2024
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Sword but very curved and yet not very famous
(Ethiopian shotel)
Pretty famous among FromSoft fans.
Dex build rejoice
Well i'm not one of them.
Just how long is that? I struggle to calculate it from what I see.
Blade is around 1 meter long.
That looks way longer
It do looks longer than it is because of proportions. It's very thin and the handle is pretty short compared to European blades because the blade is also very light so it don't need much counterweight.
Probably the round thing (a shield?) fooled us both. For me it looked like a two-hander.
This looks more like a scythe that doubles as a weapon to me
It was probably inspired by Egyptian khopesh since it was used in Ethiopia even before the kingdom of Axum. Thing is, the blade is sharp on both sides. So you could either use its inner side as big sickle to reach around enemy shield and try for the weak spots like neck, face or armpits, or if the enemy didn't had a shield you could turn it to outer side and in this case it was similar to Persian shamshir in being excellent weapon against unarmored opponents.
Two more interesting thing about it was 1: the designs varies greatly, most were shorter and wider, the curvature also varied; and 2: it apparently worked quite well considering it has been in use for possibly over 2500 years and some Ethiopian emperors even organised special elite units wielding it.
Isn't a khopesh sharp on the other side of the curve from a shotel, though? It seems like sharpening the inside was the big innovation that makes shotels distinctive
Yes, it was upgrade of khopesh.