The present axe head is characterised by a narrow neck that connects a sharp, demi-lune blade on one side with a rounded edge on the other. The pronounced nature of the curvature of the blade is similar to those found in axe heads from the Luristan region, in present-day Western Iran, from the second and first millennia B.C. These examples, however, display a degree of decoration absent from the present axe, which suggests our specimen could also have originated in a different region. Bronze Age Anatolian axes, produced by the Hittites, have a similarly configured double head, with one end rounded, and also bear no signs of decoration.

In the nineteenth century, the present axe was owned by the Sauerborn and Maurer families, who came from Koblenz in central Germany. They were a family of doctors, pharmacists and pastors. Professor Dr Heinz Hungerland (1905-1987), their descendant, was a German physician and paediatrician. He was Head of the University of Giessen and Director of the University Children’s Hospital in Bonn. After the war, he became a professor of paediatrics at the Medical Academy of the University of Giessen and, from 1951-1957, he was director of the Children’s Hospital there. In 1958, Professor Dr Hungerland received a call to the University of Bonn for the chair of Paediatrics, where he taught until his retirement in 1973. Since 1968 he was also chairman of the German Society for Paediatrics and Youth Medicine.