On the Use of Indian Terms for Identification of Weapon Types

[ariel]

Rawson has my respect: his book was the first one dedicated specifically to Indian arms.
But to call his book “…the only ….scientific work…” is rather funny. Rawson was never interested in arms history. This book was an assignment given to him to describe the collection of the V&A Museum. He never ventured outside of it and was not even certain whether other similar collections existed elsewhere, India not even mentioned. As a result, he assigned names to different objects simply by their percent-wise representation of labels on which they were listed in the V&A archives. He was lumping mechanical damascus and wootz together: Fig.6: “ watered mechanical damascus of the Kirk Narduban pattern”, pp. 19-20 describing 4 patterns of Persian damascus: Kirk Narduban, Bidr or Qum, Begami and Sham, all of which were allegedly produced by a “method of mechanical damascus/ pattern welding” etc, etc, etc. His bibliography list doesn’t even mention books by Buttin and Stone. In short, while sorely needed in the 1960’s as the “first”, this book outlived its purpose because of not being “right”.

Having finished his assignment, Rawson published nothing more in the arms history field, concentrating instead on Oriental erotic art. The only conceivable connection between them is his repeated mention of the “ phallic energy” of Indian swords:-)