Bhutan knife swap/sale

[Tim Simmons]

Swap for Africa? or other. Might sell. Horn finish to scabbard. old damage to handle. Nice blade. 4mm back to blade sharp with flex unlike many others that heavy with functuality.

[fernando]

PM sent.
Fernando

[Tim Simmons]

Sikkim which does make a small differnce.

http://webprojects.prm.ox.ac.uk/arms...ers/1907.47.4/

[Tim Simmons]

I think this may have found a new home.

[Philip]

The impression which I've gleaned over the years of examining and discussing is that this type of knife is from the frontier region of lowland southern Bhutan and the northern Assam, in the watershed of the Brahmaputra River. The design of the metal ferrule reinforcing the wasp-waisted grip at the root of the blade is similar to that on the more familiar Bhutanese swords from the Tibetan-influenced highland regions of the country. The open-fronted scabbard concept is something seen in many parts of SE Asia, such as on the Kachin dao, the swords of the Taiwan highlanders, and on various "bolos" and knives of the central and northern Philippines.

[dennee]

That these shortswords or jungle knives belong to the "Lepchas" (aka Lapche--from Nepalese--Rongpas, meaning valley people, or, as they call themselves, Mutanchi Rong Kup Rum Kup) there can be no doubt. There are plenty of photos of Lepchas carrying this weapon/tool, commonly known as ban or payak/pa-yuk, which may have been a longer sword form. The ban was pictured in Claude White's Sikhim and Bhutan and discussed there and in nearly every older article on Sikkim or the Lepchas.

Lepcha migration into Sikkim is remote enough that they have no tradition of migration. They are said to have come from Burma and Assam in the 13th century, but others think they may have come from Tibet and Nepal. They are found from the Elam district of eastern Nepal (part of Sikkim until 1815) to the Chumbi Valley (Tromo) of Tibet, putting them on the western doorstep of Bhutan.

The Lepchas' origins and their continuing to inhabit the humid, jungle valleys of Sikkim explain the open scabbard and the heaviness of the hacking blades.

While the shape of the blades differ, the ban has some similarities to the working knives and shortswords of Bhutan, the barchem and nalong (the former of which has a chisel shaped end, the latter a rougher and shorter version of the patang). They have some similarity in material and shape of hilt and scabbard, although the Bhutanese scabbards are closed; the Lepcha scabbards are essentially one half of the Bhutanese closed scabbard. They also share the characteristic of a heavy spine for hacking. (Diffusion and adaptation or parallel development?)

There don't seem to be any ban around of great age. In 1909, Claude White noted that the quality of Lepcha knives was good, but regretted that they had ceased forging them from "indigeneous charcoal iron," but manufacture had long since switched to using steel bar stock that was presumably imported and thus probably "monosteel" as opposed to Tibetan-style laminated (much as Bhutanese working knives are now commonly made from Japanese car springs imported from India).