VERY Unusual Marks on a Kaskara

[Iain]

Hi Stephen,

Yes, from Panoply. I'm also not sure of the source of the blade. I doubt it's locally made and the floral decoration doesn't look all that common to the area, probably from the Maghreb instead.

Thanks for your thoughts on Euro blades, very helpful for me.

It's maybe a bit different situation with takouba - or just my point of view. Generally speaking the triple fullered blades with double half moons aren't European at least in my limited observations (Briggs seems to agree although notes the possibility of locally applied markings on import blades). Perhaps I should say usually as you can never rule out the odd possibility but I tend to think these are just nice native blades, not imported blades with applied marks. The obviously applied marks on imports I've seen are etched or scratched. Not stamped. There's a lot of nice European blades but an equal number of very nicely mounted native blades. I don't see spending that much time on good fittings for blades that were considered inferior. The older ones have good flex and good edge retention from what I can tell. So I don't believe the native blades always ended at the bottom of the scale. Of course that goes for takouba, but from the bit I know about kaskara I think it's generally the same?

Potentially important, I have seen good quality native blades turning up more frequently in the southern style brass hilts. Could be that high quality local production was absorbed closer to the source?

I'd agree on the steel quality, I see much more rust on native blades. I believe the iron composition is the contributing factor. Native blades are usually of Hausa manufacture (or Nupe potentially). Several Hausa cities had massive blacksmithing centers. A separate caste handled smelting and there was enough local ore production that I believe native blades would have been manufactured from native ore rather than imported ingots or bars. Beyond that one group of hereditarily trained smiths handled iron related smithing further sub grouped in large cities into bladesmiths. A second group handled 'white' metals such as brass, copper and silver. These are the Makèeran bakii and Malièeran farii respectively. The Tuareg were noted for having especially good relations with the smith castes among the Hausa (surprise, surprise ).

I'm not enough of a metallurgy expert to try and explain the details but I would guess the exact composition of the local ore is the reason behind the rusting differences and maybe less carbon? I don't feel like sacrificing any of mine for more detailed tests!

EDIT: The eyelash markings are indicated as potentially pointing to Spanish origin by Briggs. Time to look into pentagrams in Spain I think! Wild thought, could this be a blade made in an Islamic area of Spain, or a bit later in Morocco?