Stone Mace-head

Origins

Before the mace, a war club was a piece of wood, perhaps with a knot or a stone lashed to it. The mace-head was a leap forward: a stone ground into a regular shape and drilled through the middle so that a handle could pass through it and the head would not fly off. Drilling a hole through hard stone with a bow drill and sand took hours of labor, and that investment says something important. The mace was not a hunting tool — a club is a poor way to kill game compared with a spear or an arrow — and archaeologists generally regard the Neolithic mace-head as one of the first objects designed for fighting people. Mace-heads appear in the Near East by the seventh millennium BC and spread across Neolithic Europe and the Nile Valley.

Design & Construction

A mace-head is a ball, disc or pear of stone, typically a few inches across, bored with a cylindrical hole. In Egypt the early Naqada culture made flat disc-shaped heads, later replaced by pear-shaped ones, which concentrated more weight behind a smaller striking surface. Makers chose hard, heavy and often handsome stones — limestone, diorite, porphyry, breccia — and polished them carefully. The handle was wood, fitted tightly and sometimes fixed with a leather or resin binding. In Neolithic Britain and Scandinavia, related perforated stone heads include elaborately shaped battle-axe and mace forms, some so fine and unworn that they must have been made for display.

Combat Use

A stone mace delivers its whole weight to a small point, and against an unprotected head it was lethal. Skeletons from the Neolithic show the healed and unhealed skull fractures that clubs and maces caused. In Egypt the mace became the weapon of the king in the imagery of war that began at the end of the Predynastic period: the Narmer Palette, around 3100 BC, shows the king grasping a kneeling enemy by the hair and raising a pear-shaped mace to strike him, and the "smiting" pose was repeated in Egyptian art for three thousand years. The ceremonial mace-heads of the early kings, such as the carved Scorpion and Narmer mace-heads from Hierakonpolis, record royal deeds in relief.

Legacy

The stone mace lost its place in war as the Bronze Age brought copper and bronze helmets that could turn a blow, and weapons with edges — the axe, and later swords like the Egyptian Khopesh — took over. But the mace never lost its meaning as a sign of authority. Metal maces returned to the battlefield in the Middle Ages, when the Medieval Mace was the answer to armor, and the ceremonial mace survives today in the maces carried before parliaments, universities and city officials: a direct descendant of the royal mace of the first Egyptian kings.