Boarding Cutlass

The cutlass was the sailor's sword of the Age of Sail: short, broad-bladed, and basket-guarded, built for the crowded chaos of a boarding action where a long blade fouled in rigging and a delicate one broke on a boarding pike. Navies issued it by the rack, pirates made it their emblem, and it outlasted every other edged weapon in shipboard service — the U.S. Navy did not formally retire its last cutlass until the twentieth century.

Bolo Knife

The bolo is the broad-bladed working knife of the Philippines — wider toward the tip, weighted for the chop, the universal tool of field and jungle — and a weapon with a genuine military career: the blade of the Philippine Revolution and the guerrilla resistance of World War II, and, in an unusual compliment, an official issue pattern of the United States Army, whose M1904 and M1917 bolos equipped engineers, medics, and machine-gun crews through two wars.

Bowie Knife

The Bowie knife is the great American fighting blade of the nineteenth century: a heavy sheath knife, typically with a clipped point and a blade of eight inches or more, named for James Bowie and made famous by the 1827 Sandbar Fight, where a wounded Bowie killed his attacker with his big butcher-style knife. Within a decade Sheffield's cutlers were shipping Bowies to America by the crate, and the knife had become sidearm, tool, and legend across the frontier.

Egyptian Khopesh

The khopesh is the curved sickle-sword of Bronze Age Egypt, its blade sweeping into a crescent with the cutting edge on the OUTSIDE of the curve. Evolved from Mesopotamian axe-swords and adopted by the pharaohs' armies of the New Kingdom, it became so bound to royal and divine imagery that gods hand it to kings on temple walls. Tutankhamun was buried with two of them, and the weapon's crescent silhouette remains instant visual shorthand for the arms of pharaonic Egypt.

Ek Commando Knife

The Ek Commando knife is the private-purchase fighting knife of World War II America: hand-ground daggers and fighters from John Ek's Connecticut shop, sold only to service members and shipped with a certificate carrying each knife's serial number. Paratroopers and raiders bought them by the thousand, presidents and generals owned presentation pieces, and the distinctive cast-lead X-head rivets in the wooden grip made the Ek one of the most recognizable American blades of the war.

Greek Xiphos

The xiphos was the sidearm of the Greek hoplite: a double-edged, leaf-bladed short sword drawn when the spear — always the primary weapon — shattered in the press of the phalanx. Typically around 45 to 60 centimeters, waisted then swelling toward the point, it cut and thrust equally well in the shield-to-shield crush where no longer blade could work. Sparta, characteristically, carried the shortest versions of all — close enough, they said, to reach the enemy.

KA-BAR Knife

USMC utility knife

Karambit

The karambit is the claw-shaped knife of the Malay world: a small, sharply curved blade from Sumatra and the surrounding archipelago, held reversed with a finger through the ring at its pommel so it cannot be dropped or easily taken. By tradition an ambush and last-resort weapon patterned on the tiger's claw, it spread through the region's silat fighting arts and, centuries later, into the global tactical-knife market, where its silhouette is now one of the most recognized in the industry.

Katana

The katana is the curved, single-edged long sword of the samurai, worn edge-up through the sash and drawn in the same motion that cuts. Its blade unites two demands that defeat most swordmakers — a hard edge that takes a razor polish and a resilient body that survives impact — through differential hardening of folded steel, the visible signature of which is the hamon along the edge. It is at once a battlefield weapon, a spiritual object, and the most recognized sword form on earth.

Kukri

The kukri is the forward-curved knife of Nepal: a broad, downward-angled blade that concentrates a blow like a hatchet while handling like a knife, equally at home splitting kindling and splitting helmets. It is the national blade of the Nepalese hill peoples, the universal tool of the Himalayan farmstead, and — as the issue sidearm of the Gurkha regiments for two centuries — one of the most famous and most instantly recognized fighting knives anywhere on earth.

Marine Raider Stiletto

The Marine Raider stiletto is the U.S. Marine Corps' copy of the British Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife: a slim double-edged dagger designed purely for silent killing, issued in 1942 to the new Raider battalions and paramarines. About 14,370 were made by Camillus, carried at Makin, Guadalcanal, and Bougainville, and its silhouette — with the Raider patch it appears on — became one of the Corps' most storied emblems, though as a working knife the delicate blade lost the argument to the KA-BAR within a year.

Mark I Trench Knife

The Mark I trench knife of 1918 is the most recognizable close-combat weapon of the Great War: a double-edged dagger blade beneath a cast bronze knuckle-duster grip, its pommel ending in a skull-crusher spike. Designed for the raid — the silent, clawing fights in enemy trenches where rifles were useless — it reached the AEF late, served again in the Second World War with paratroops and rangers, and remains the collector's archetype of trench warfare.

Model 1860 Light Cavalry Saber

The Model 1860 Light Cavalry Saber was the standard edged weapon of the Union horseman: a curved, single-edged blade of about 35 inches in an iron scabbard, lighter and handier than the heavy Model 1840 'Old Wristbreaker' it replaced. Hundreds of thousands were made during the Civil War, and though the revolver and carbine did most of the cavalry's real killing, the saber charge at Brandy Station and Gettysburg kept the blade's place in the war's story.

Roman Gladius

The gladius was the short sword of the Roman legionary and the weapon that conquered the Mediterranean world. Adopted from Iberian patterns during the Punic Wars, it paired a broad two-edged blade of roughly 50 to 68 centimeters with a long tapering point, optimized for the tight ranks of the legion, where a soldier stabbed past his shield rather than swung. For some four centuries it equipped the most successful heavy infantry of the ancient world.

Scottish Claymore

Claymore — Gaelic claidheamh-mòr, 'great sword' — names the two-handed sword of the Highland clans of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, instantly known by its forward-sloping quillons ending in pierced quatrefoils — a hilt form found nowhere else in Europe. The name later passed to the basket-hilted broadsword that the clans carried through the Jacobite risings, and between the two of them the claymores arm every image of the fighting Highlander from Bannockburn myth to the sworn charges and grapeshot of Culloden fact.

Spetsnaz Trench Shovel

Swept-Hilt Rapier

The swept-hilt rapier was the civilian sword of the late Renaissance: a long, narrow thrusting blade defended by a basket of gracefully curved bars sweeping from crossguard to pommel. Born in Spain and Italy as the 'dress sword' of gentlemen and worn daily with civilian clothes, it created a new world of private fencing — the masters, salles, and printed treatises of the sixteenth century — and remains, for many students of arms, the most elegant object European swordsmiths ever produced.

Tanto

The tanto is the dagger of the samurai: a single- or double-edged Japanese blade under thirty centimeters, forged, hardened, and polished by exactly the methods of the great swords and worn as their constant companion. It was armor's answer at grappling distance, the blade of the warrior household, and the canvas for some of the finest work Japanese smiths ever produced — and its name now also describes the chisel-pointed blade style modern makers borrowed from it.

Tomahawk

The tomahawk is the light axe of the North American frontier: an Algonquian name, a Native American weapon concept, and a European-forged iron head, fused by the fur trade into the continent's universal sidearm. Warriors, rangers, and frontiersmen all carried it for two centuries as tool, weapon, and diplomatic symbol — the pipe tomahawk smoked for peace and swung for war — and American soldiers, four centuries later, still buy, issue, and carry its direct descendants.

Viking Battle Axe

The battle axe was the most distinctively Norse weapon of the Viking Age. From the one-handed bearded axe that doubled as a farm tool to the great two-handed Dane axe whose thin crescent blade could shear through shield and helmet, it was cheap to make, brutally effective, and carried by everyone from farmer-raiders to the huscarls of kings. Contemporary chroniclers from England to Byzantium remembered the Northmen by this weapon above all others, and surviving heads from graves and river finds number in the thousands.