text: It is known that Middle Minoan bronze work flourished as an independent native art. To the very beginning of this epoch belongs the largest sword of the age, found in the palace of Malia. It is a flat blade, 79 cm long, with a broad base and a sharp point; there is a gold and crystal hilt but no ornament on the blade. A dagger of somewhat later date, now in the Metropolitan Museum of New York is the earliest piece of decorated bronze from Crete. Both sides of the blade are engraved with drawings: bulls fighting and a man hunting boars in a thicket. Slightly later again (MM III) are a series of blades from mainland Greece, which must be attributed to Cretan craftsmen, with ornament in relief, or incised, or inlaid with gold, silver and niello. The most elaborate inlays, pictures of men hunting lions and cats hunting birds, are on daggers from the shaftgraves of Mycenae. These large designs cover the whole of the flat blade except its edge, but on swords, best represented by finds at Knossos, the ornament is restricted to the high midribs which are an essential feature of the longer blades. The type belongs to the beginning of the Late Minoan (Mycenaean) age. The hilt is made in one piece with the blade; it has a horned guard, a flanged edge for holding grip-scales, and a tang for a pommel. The scales were ivory or some other perishable substance and were fixed with bronze rivets; the pommels were often made of crystal. A rapier from Zapher Papoura (Knossos) is 91.3 cm long; its midrib and hilt-flange are engraved with bands of spiral coils, and its rivet-heads (originally gold-cased) with whorls. Ordinary Mycenaean blades are enriched with narrow mouldings, parallel to the midribs of swords and daggers, or to the curved backs of one-edged knives. The spearheads have hammered sockets. Other tools and implements are oval two-edged knives, square-ended razors, cleavers, chisels, hammers, axes, mattocks, ploughshares and saws. Cycladic and mainland Greek (Helladic) weapons show no ornament but include some novel types. A tanged spearhead has a slit (Cycladic) or slipped (Helladic) blade for securing the shaft; and the halberd, a west European weapon, was in use in the Middle Helladic Greece. There are few remains of Mycenaean metal armour; a plain cheek-piece from a helmet comes from Ialysos in Rhodes, and a pair of greaves from Enkomi in Cyprus. One of the greaves has wire riveted to its edge for fastening.