After analysing each imbuable melee weapon (data from here) I came to two conclusions.
1) Usually you'll rather use a 1-handed weapon when comparing to 2-handed weapons, since the spellbooks usually gives great advantage with more ML, sometimes an elemental protection, etc.
In those cases, there are current 4 weapons that divide the best melee weapon category, all clubs
Unliving Demonbone, Sulphurous Demobone, Rotten Demonbone and Energized Demonbone
Not only they all give more defense value than a magic sword (39 against 38), they even give +1 armor (that may or not be useful, since the damage reduction only applies if your total arm sum is an even number). The difference between all 4 is the elemental each one will protect you against (Death, fire, earth, energy, respectively).
The only problem of those weapons is that rare loot from bosses of The Secret Library Quest (and Rotten Demonbone isn't even confirmed on Tibia Fandom as being from there. We are not actually sure where you can get one), so not only they're really rare, they're also pretty expensive.
That put aside, if you can expend that money and are lucky enough to find someone selling one of them, they're unarguibly the best weapons you can use for a mage low level.
After those, the best 1-handed weapon is indeed the Magic Sword, hence its notority.
2) In a few cases, in which you may rather get a 2-handed weapon with 3 slot instead of one-handed weapon with 2 slots only, the only option is the Rift Lance