A kind of pesh kabz, opinion and translation please

[francantolin]

Hello dear members,

I please ask tour opinion about what seems to me an indian or afghan pesh kabz with an armour piercer tip.
Seems an old model but the blade seems not as old,mauve a " tourist " item.
On the "date" side , I can read ont three numbers:
a 1 a 3 and a 9
So if it is 1390 writes , it was made on 1970...
( but where it the fourth number ??

Glad if somebody can translate the cartouche
( seems not the best craftmen work... )

Kind regards

[ariel]

Islamic dating very often omits not the last number but the first one: millennium.
Rather than reading the date as a 139(?) it is ( IMHO) more likely to be 1139, i.e. 1726-27 Gregorian.
The general appearance does not seem to agree with late 20 century, but the 18th one is quite probable. How about a good pic of the entire thing, blade, handle, scabbard, photographed directly from above?
You may want to send a pm to Kwiatek, I bet he can read the cartouches and verify my dating.

[mahratt]

Originally Posted by francantolin

Hello dear members,

I please ask tour opinion about what seems to me an indian or afghan pesh kabz with an armour piercer tip.
Seems an old model but the blade seems not as old,mauve a " tourist " item.

Kind regards

Hello.

I think your guess is correct. This is a tourist item.
As you can see for yourself, the blade is made not in Eastern traditions, but in imitation of European blades. Although, perhaps, calling this knife "tourist" is not true. Maybe it was used as a weapon in the late 20th century.
The question of inscriptions on blades is always not very simple. 1) there is never 100% certainty that the date printed on the blade corresponds to the year of manufacture (we all know about the blades of Assadullah)
2) as my acquaintances Afghans told me, the numbers that are applied to the blade or the metal elements of the handle are sometimes an ideogram denoting the name of the owner.

[fernando]

Any reason not to show us the whole piece, francantolin ? Can we see the entire piece ?

[Richard G]

My two pennies worth - zero in arabic script is a dot, which can be overlooked or omitted. Thus AH1309 is a possibility.
Regards
Richard
PS. I can see 'amal' which indicates it is a date of manufacture.

[ariel]

Indeed, there is a long gap between 3 and 9 and a missing 0 there is a theoretical possibility. Howevver, I cannot recall any Islamic date written with a number in the its middle omitted.
However, whether 1139 (1726 G) or 1309 ( 1891 G) , both are far, far earlier than 1970’s:-)

The armor-piercing tip also makes the end of the 20th century unlikely: the age of armour was over long before that. I see nothing sharing its appearance with any European features except for the ricasso, but “indian ricasso” might be a direct possibility.

Waiting for Kwiatek.

[mahratt]

Thinking aloud: having an "armor-piercing" point does not guarantee that the dagger was made in the days when armor was used ...

[mahratt]

I would like the participants in the discussion to carefully read the messages of other participants. Carelessness can often lead to embarrassing mistakes. In any case, I hope that this is inattention, and not a desire to distort other people's words to please my own opinion.

Originally Posted by mahratt

I think your guess is correct. This is a tourist item.
As you can see for yourself, the blade is made not in Eastern traditions, but in imitation of European blades. Although, perhaps, calling this knife "tourist" is not true. Maybe it was used as a weapon in the late 20th century.

Very often, if one or two sentences are removed from the reasoning, the meaning of the reasoning changes completely. Usually this is used by journalists of the "yellow press".

At the same time, I don’t think that there is a big difference if this dagger was made in the 1950s-1960s or in the 1990s. The important thing is that this item is made under European influence and is absolutely not traditional...

However, this does not mean that it is a bad dagger. It's just that in my opinion it is necessary to really evaluate the objects that fall into our collections.