New arrival for Christmas - Allarh
 

Just a nice older allarh. I've always wanted one of these and this one came along at the right price. Just a few images (it still needs a deeper clean) and posing with some takouba.

I like these too Iain. They may not be the most elegant spears, but they are so unique, made with a purpose and deadly efficient, and they do have a certain elegance of their own.

Your example is especially nicely decorated.

Congrats...nothing says Christmas like a stocking full of spears!!! :D

Thanks Charles! I too enjoy the unique aspects of the form. Actually this one arrive bent from shipping, but thanks to a vice I managed to the same type of repair I figure was common in the field with these. They are such a dynamic thrusting weapon and those barbs.... not nice!

Interesting example. The brass decoration is similarly found on Arabian spears from the Nejd region. All Arabian spears look the same in a way, but only Nejd has inlay of brass on their spears and sometimes even gold.

Can you post multiple examples of such spears for comparison?

They are all pretty similar in the decorative style, bands of copper or brass inlaid into the shaft. Here's one from Wolf's excellent website.

http://www.africanarms.com/all-album...091-107058707/

This is a nice old colorized photo of some Hoggar Tuaregs showing the lances.

Down Memory Lane
 

I especially like these lances. I thought I had photographed a number of variations and placed those images on the forum, but now, a focused Google search having failed to show them, I suspect that it was for a Timonium presentation. I will have to see if I can locate those files and include them here.

Back during the window of relatively safe travel in the region, I brought back examples in my baggage from each trip. The first trip was to Mali, and genuine examples were scarce with a 'suitcase friendly' degenerate version abundant in the market for tourists. In Niger, there were still plenty of genuine antique and working examples in the market.

I had an inquiry from a member that search functions had failed for him in this morning's e-mail. There were no changes here, but I do recommend Google as a great way to search the forums (syntax example: tuareg spear site:www.vikingsword.com). This prompted the following trip down memory lane:

Mali 1999

Niger 2000

Judging from the length compared to a man, those spears seem short?

Mine is 186cm, typically they are 180-210cm or even bigger. Also Tuaregs can be very tall!

I would love to see your presentation and images! There is not a lot of material out there on these lances beyond the basics. You've linked to some of the first threads I ever read about takouba on. :) Certain takes me back in time!

Nice spear, Iain. I've always quite liked these. Good also it retains the leather wrapping, often these seem to be lacking...

Regards.

Iain - I found an partially annotated version of the old 2006 Timonium powerpoint and have extracted the slides from the section on the allarh and put them in this pdf. The quality of the photographs is quite disappointing and I clearly need to re-shoot all of these.

Thanks Colin,

This is the first one of a quality that inspired me to acquire it. Usually they are later or too hard to arrange shipping. I wouldn't mind a few more in the future!

Lee, many thanks for taking the time to dig out the images. I think I recall them now as part of the presentation which I have a copy of somewhere. I forgot entirely it also covered Allarh!