Katars from the Metropolitan Museum of Art
 

The Metropolitan Museum has 82 katars in their collection, of these only 2 are on display and 63 are available for viewing online. The majority of the museums katar were willed to the museum by George C. Stone, it is a superb and varied collection and yet it is practically unknown and unseen. Many of the images are high resolution which allows the fine details to be brought out with editing.

I have gone through and edited all of the images and created many new ones including some with incredible detail. I have also created a pinterest site and added the images of each katar there so that anyone can view them. Unfortunately there is not a lot of info attached to the museums katars, if anyone can add any information such as region of manufacture etc to any of the katars descriptions they are all individually numbered, you can leave a post here and I will add the information to the description.

http://www.pinterest.com/worldantiqu...f-art-collect/

Thank you.

James your welcome, I am continuing with the rest of the Indo-Persian weapons images from the Metropolitan Museum, they have a fantastic variety of knives and daggers from India, Persia and the Ottoman Empire etc along with a few swords, maces, axe and firearms, here are some examples of the types of details that can be seen with some editing. I will post a link when I am done.

Fantastic work Eric. The editing of the images really do make a difference in viewing the items and studying the detail - good job!

Runjeet.

Thanks Runjeet, while I do appreciate that the Met actually took any pictures at all which is something many museums have not done, unless photos are properly edited they are not fully utilizing the images.

Here is a link to all of the Mets katar images http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/...ar&rpp=90&pg=1

Some are probably pre-digital, others are more recent. You can zoom in on the high resolution images and see the details but you have to edit them to save and study the details, and to compare front and back views etc. Also when the images are properly displayed in a way that allows all of the images to be seen at one time such as with Pinterest it is much easier to study them.

A few interesting things I have noted is the use of some sort of silvering covering entire blades or even the whole katar, and the way many blades seem to be set at an angle and not just straight with the handle.