The Macuahuitl, a weapon used by Mesoamerican civilisations including the Aztecs. It features obsidian blades embedded onto the club sides, which are capable of having an edge sharper than high-quality steel razor blades. According to Bernal Diaz del Castillo, he witnessed it decapitating a horse.
So….turns out
Sticks and stones….. Can decapitate a horse
Sharp but also brittle.
I would imagine the main issue with this weapon was that obsidian doesn’t have a lot of malleability, and would be more prone to breaking. Then, once an individual blade had broken, the bit wedged in the wood would still be in there, and it may be difficult to remove and replace with a fresh blade.
Most of the images in the links OP provides show much shorter blades protruding from the wood, which would help mitigate this problem, but I imagine if you hit a particularly thick area of bone, or an invader’s metal armor, you’d still end up chipping or fully breaking one or more of the individual blades.
Still not a weapon I’d ever want to be facing down.
Hold one in each hand and you’ve got yourself a decent osrs crush weapon
In the original account, it did decapitate a horse but not in one swing cleanly through. Still, a wicked weapon and Mexican natives weren’t afraid to use it on horses.
The last thing you hear is a death whistle before this thing takes off your head.
Varlamore!
This photo is not historically accurate. I know Im sounding nerdy but just had to put it out there. The obsidian bladelets would not be ground but “knapped” which means they would be fractured in a controlled manner to shape them.
Who needs steel when you’ve got REALLY sharp rocks…
That’s a paddling.
note that the picture features ground obsidian, which arn’t sharper than razor blades, its the knapped obsidian flakes which they would have used that are insanely sharp
Next level cricket
They still make scalpels with obsidian blades.
Interesting weapon, but this pangs of folk lore worship. There’s obvious problems this instrument would have with decapitating a horse, and obsidian is essentially glass, and not durable.
Not a good image to use as an example.
Bullshit it decapitated a horse
I always thought obsidian was brittle so wouldn’t those the obsidian on this weapon not shatter?
Little known fact – We Brits got Cricket from the Aztecs
We got these in Old school runescape quite recently! Dual bonkers is what some people call them. You get one in each hand.
Ah yes War God Kotal Khan rocked shit with this in MKX. down forward 1 I believe was the meaty overhead sword strike that had a satisfying rip sound as well
jesus, what did that horse do?
They made the valamore update real??
I see you’ve been doing some perilous moons 👀
Plus obsidian is so cool and nice looking !
Further sources and reading:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macuahuitl
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249846166_The_macuahuitl_an_innovative_weapon_of_the_Late_Post-Classic_in_Mesoamerica
https://www.ancient-origins.net/history-ancient-traditions/macuahuitl-0018275
https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/obsidian-sword-0012233
Obsidian scalpels are a thing for this very reason.
Ahh yes, the sword-paddle-oar-club.
I love using this game in THE FINALS
Imagine facing that unarmoured.
This must be among the top tiers of weapon design in a pre-metallurgy context.
If I had a nickels for every Mayan post I’ve seen today I’d have two nickels which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice.
Okay I see this thingy and I remember it being in El Dorado and on next fn level I saw people doin’ the Mayan thingy with the hips and the ball and the hole