Help wanted Identification of Katars

[B.I]

the dotted inscriptions are thought to be inventory or shelf marks. this is a loose description, but it has been debated and no better 'guess' has been offered. they are from the bikaner armoury, as others have stated and thought to have been put onto the contents of the armoury at some point in the 19thC.
there is an account from the armourer of bikaner in 1900, discussing the potential origins of some of the pieces and the placement of there marks could have hailed from this time (as it was hinted that this armourer had gone through the collection. either way, the 19thC date comes from the fact that certain 19thC pieces hold the same type of marking, as well has 16thC pieces in the same armoury. the marks were put onto all pieces, whether made in the region or captured at some point in the armouries history. some pieces (like some of your daggers) held more than one set of marks, and some had up to 4. again, this has fed the 'shelf mark' theory, in that when moved, an additional set of marks were put on. personally, i feel this is little thin, but i am happy to believe they are inventory marks of some kind. they cannot be armourers marks (which has been agreed, no matter what else is debated) as these marks were put alongside armourers marks, and were normally poorly done. also, they were put onto pieces that were many hundreds of miles apart in origin, and upto 400 years apart in date.
the marks are normally numbers, and many (maybe even a majority) were preceded with a 'symbol' that was neither a number nor a letter. i have attached a compliation of this symbol found in the pieces on this particular post.
what this symbol is i dont know, but hope to find out at some point in my lifetime. i have been pursuing it for a number of years and have only heard specualtion. the armoury itself (now a series of museums) cant offer any more information. an interesting point is that there did exist a written inventory, which was seen a number fo years ago. this ledger may hold clues, but i'm afraid it will never be seen again, being condemning evidence against the hoard of pieces going missing some 10 years ago (and ultimately ending up in your brothers collection).

the numbers itself could be a number of different languages, but the presence of other dotted inscriptions (other than numbers and this symbol) show the language to be a strange for of devanagri, although different enough to be a possible language in itself.
i have had aome of these longer inscription read, but with no satifactory results.
the problem is that devenagri is a written language only, and whatever form of it this is, seems to have been forgotten many years ago.

inscriptions aside, look again to the very large katar your brother has. the grip bars seem a little mishapen.
this is because they could possibly have been chisselled elephant heads (one on either side - 4 in total) which was a feature shown in some other pieces from the same armoury. yours are very worn, as are the facets of the grip bars but i'm sure this was the original feature.