By this axe, he ruled!

-Shep

'Unusually Tall' Skeleton, Severed Arm Found in 4,000-Year-Old Bronze Age Burial Mound near Bulgaria’s Black Sea Coast - Archaeology in Bulgaria

archaeologyinbulgaria.com

Thanks for the link, Shep.

Thrace was the invasion corridor via which the ancestors of the Homeric and Archaic Hellenes invaded the Balkan peninsula. Based on the structure of their religion, with the Titans supplanted by three successive sky gods: Poseidon, Zeus and Apollo, this was quite a long process. Thrace remained a center for formidable warriors throughout antiquity, with Thracian, Aggrianian, Dacian and Sarmatian warrior tribes having the type of barbarian cultures [meaning mixed means economies in which hunting, herding and agriculture coexisted] imagined by Robert E. Howard when he crafted his Kull and Conan characters.

In my research for The Broken Dance I gathered mentions in ancient literature of three different Herakles figures in Hellenic pre-history. Note, that in the bronze age, such formidable warriors were probably strong-arm men, not necessarily rulers, as indicated by this man's secondary position in the burial mound. It would be useful to imagine Achilles, the greatest of the Achaeans, who was manifestly not the king.

The arm buried with this man is fascinating. If it is a right arm I would suggest it as the arm of a sacrificed warrior captive placed to indicate that this man was the right arm of the of the ruler to which the greater portion of the mound was dedicated to. If the left I would suggest the arm of an assassin.

Large men and axes work well together, and in the age of shields that was the bronze age an axe is an excellent weapon for the defeat of such devices.

As a final note, the composite bow and chariot had just come on the scene. Indeed, 2,000 B.C. was the advent of the Indo-European invasions of the Middle East and the Middle Sea, which corresponded with the first evidence of boxing in the civilized world. Since this man was in good health, he may have been killed, like Achilles, by an arrow from the dreaded composite bow. This was also the fate of Cyrus, who met his end at Scythian hands in the vicinity of the Black Sea.