Scythe

The scythe is an agricultural hand tool for mowing grass and harvesting crops, consisting of a long shaft fitted with a curved steel blade sixty to ninety centimeters long. Archaeological evidence suggests scythes date back as far as roughly 7000 BC, and the tool became widespread with early agricultural societies such as the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture; the Romans used a similar hay-cutting tool they called the falx foenaria. Beyond farming, the scythe has repeatedly been pressed into service as an improvised weapon, most famously in Poland during the 1794 Kosciuszko Uprising, when peasant soldiers short of firearms formed scythe-armed units under the motto they feed and defend. Converting the tool for combat meant remounting the blade parallel to the shaft to form a polearm known as a war scythe, a transformation with parallels in the Greek harpe, the Egyptian khopesh and the German Renaissance scythe sword. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/