Dragonglass in ancient Egypt

I watched the eighth episode – “The Prince of Winterfell” – from the second season of Game of Thrones again. In this episode Lord Commander Mormont and the Black brothers go ranging beyond the Wall. When the men of the Night’s Watch set up their camp at the Fist of the First Men they find a hidden cache under an ancient rune stone. In this cache they discover an old black cloak of a sworn brother, a war horn and dozens of blades made of dragonglass . . . or obsidian, like the maesters call it – as Samwell Tarly points out so eloquently. He also speculates about the age of the find which he estimates as hundreds or even thousands of years.

A prehistoric obsidian blade from Egypt 
 (Inv.-Nr. 2009,6017.694
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, Photo British Museum)

In ancient Egypt obsidian was also used, although only in small numbers for actual weapons, such as lance-heads. There are some examples kept in the British Museum and in the Petrie Museum in London. They date to the earliest period of Egyptian history and are more than five thousand years old.

Obsidian is a volcanic glass of often black colour, but it could also have a brown, greenish or reddish shade depending on the minerals involved in the process of formation. The glass is hard and brittle and fractures with very sharp edges – a characteristic it shared with flint stone, a common material in Egypt that was extensively used for tools and blades by the ancient inhabitants of the Nile valley. 

Obsidian on the other hand is not found naturally in Egypt, so it had to be traded for from other regions like Ethiopia and the Sudan in the south or from some of the islands of the Cyclades, from Anatolia or Armenia in the north. The Egyptians used it mainly for small amulets, scarabs, inlays, vessels and little statuettes. Blades or arrowheads are rare, but some examples survived through the ages. 

A pesesh-kef in the Brooklyn Museum New York 
made of obsidian
(Inv.-Nr. 35.1445, CC BY 3.0 Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

One is an almost seven inches long obsidian blade in the Brooklyn Museum in New York. It dates from 3300 to 3100 BCE and was probably found in Akhmim, a city in Middle Egypt, about 200 km north of Luxor. Such a blade is called “pesesh-kef” in the old tongue. The term describes a fishtail-shaped ritual knife that was used during one of the many Egyptian funerary rites. Before burying the dead the “pesesh-kef” was touched to the mouth of the deceased. This should give the dead one back the ability to breathe and therefore allow him to continue his existence in the far regions of the netherworld.


Sources: A. Lucas, Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries (London 1948) p. 473-474.