Two unpublished mediaeval anthropomorphic knife handles from the National Museum in Cracow

Abstract

The article is the first publication on two mediaeval anthropomorphic knife handles from the collection of the National Museum in Cracow, never described in the literature so far. One of them shows a man feeding with his left hand a falcon sitting on his right arm (fig. 1). This item has no archaeological context. The other artefact shows a woman holding in her hands an object which is usually interpreted as a book, or less frequently as a box (fig. 2). Both motifs, especially the former one, are often found in knife handles and hair parters dating from between the 2nd half of the 13th and the 14th c. Considering the style of the man’s headgear, the first item can be assumed to have been made in the first half of the 14th c. The other handle can be dated broadly to the 14th c.; and it is more interesting to investigate. It was found in Cracow at the end of the 19th c., during construction works. It had not been finished: there is unworked raw material at the bottom of the figure. The carving of this artefact was abandoned as it had cracked lengthwise. This find proves that handles of that type were made not only in Western Europe, as is widely assumed, but also in Central Europe, including Poland.