Sword types

Early Daggers
The tool first used by human beings was the hand axe. Although, at first sight, it may be mistaken for a dagger the tool was held with the sharp point facing out from a hand in a claw shape rather than in a straight line extending from a hand clasped around a handle.

Bronze Sword
The stone and then copper  used by early humans was too brittle and fragile to be formed into any sort of long blade causing them to use axes, spears and occasionally daggers. With the discovery of bronze a long blade for a sword could finally be made.

Although bronze could be used to make swords the need for both copper and tin or arsenic ment that, with the exception of the population of a few locations, you needed large trade routes to aquire the stuff. Further you needed substantial amounts of copper relative to the amount that was formed after the great elemental war and due to bronze still being relatively weak the swords were not much good.

All these factors combined to mean that only a very few leaders owned and used bronze swords.

Typically the swords were well over a meter long as most leaders who could aquire copper could do so in sufficient quantities to make a fairly large sword.

Iron Swords
Iron Swords were easier to produce (due to the abundence of iron) and even slightly stronger than bronze. Like the rest of iron weaponry it opened up the manafacture of the weapon being made out of iron (in this case a sword) to people living anywhere.

Although iron was more readily avalible, iron swords still tended to be uncommon and actually tended to be shorter than copper ones due to a lack of black smiths.