Ancient texts give few details of the acinaces, other than that characterising it as a type of "Persian sword". Because of this, authors writing in
Latin throughout history tended to equate the word with whatever type of weapon the contemporary Persians were using. Thus, it is frequently used in
medieval Latin texts to refer to a
scimitar or the like, a meaning it still retains in
scientific Latin.
Paulus Hector Mair even goes so far as to translate
dussack as
acinaces, because it is curved like a scimitar, and likewise in the works of
Jesuit authors describing Japan,
acinaces is used for . However, the Persian curved
shamshir is a relatively recent weapon: it developed in medieval times and did not exist in Persia in
antiquity. In the period of their main interactions with the Greeks, the Persians of the
Achaemenid Empire (550 BCE to 330 BCE) made use of more than one kind of sword. Ancient
Persian art typically shows the king's bodyguards and important
nobles wearing ornate diagonal daggers.
Greek art, on the other hand, frequently shows Persian soldiers using a
kopis-like sword. One must therefore do some research to figure out which type is the acinaces. One useful piece of evidence is that
Greek and
Roman texts sometimes mention the acinaces being given out by the king as a sign of favor. This would tend to suggest the identification of the acinaces as a dagger.
Herodotus mentions a
ritual use of
acinaces, offered as a gift to the sea by the Persian king
Xerxes (
History, VII, 54), in the ritual contrition scene following the episode known as
Flagellation of Hellespont.
Josephus, writing , describes in
Jewish Antiquities, 20.186 the weapons used by the
sicarii: This seems to indicate that it is the dagger which is properly called the acinaces, but some deny this, translating the above passage as "
concave like the Roman sica". ==Gallery==