[AvtoGaz]

Thank you Jim for your invaluable insights. If these weapons were indeed being collected in Erzurum, then their presence in the Transcaucasus and Tbilisi would make a lot of sense. As we know, a lot of the most famous ethnic Armenian masters of Caucasian Arms (example: Purunsuzov) originally hailed from Erzurum. There was a large migration of ethnic Armenians from Ezurum to the Russian empire (Most notably to Southern Georgia and the north Armenian region of Shirak) after the Russo-Turkish wars. I take it that perhaps they also brought this weapon with them, and some of the craftsmen that moved also applied their decorative style to Caucasian kindjals? Kindjals including the one I posted at the top of my post. Both the Yatagan and Kindjal at the top share their style of blade decoration and more importantly, style of inscription (which I, as a native Armenian speaker, can only describe as letter imitation. Some of the letters are real letters of the Armenian alphabet, others are not or were somehow misspelled. Not one inscription on either of them forms a coherent word. I take it either these were being produced by illiterate masters putting inscriptions on for simple decoration, or its some form of stylization that abbreviates words by omitting letters.) Given these similarities, I think these kindjals and the Kurdish-Armenian yatagans are invariably linked.

My 2 cents.