Throwing Knife

A throwing knife is a knife purpose built and weighted to be thrown effectively, a distinct category from an ordinary knife, used across many cultures for hunting, combat, sideshow performance and competitive sport. Most are a single piece of steel with no separate handle, divided into a sharpened blade section and an unsharpened grip section that provides safe handling and balance, either weighted so the center of gravity sits at the knife's geometric center or deliberately unbalanced so it must be gripped from its lighter end, with some designs adding sliding weights for versatility. Medieval combat manuals, including those of Hans Talhoffer and Paulus Hector Mair, describe throwing daggers and their techniques, and in Central Africa multi bladed iron throwing weapons known by names including onzil, kulbeda and mambele were used in war and hunting at ranges of roughly 50 meters, with evidence pointing to origins in central Sudan around 1000 AD and possible depictions in Libya as early as roughly 1350 BC.