Unusual Kaskara

[Edster]

I can't add to Jim's comment on the fantastic blade, but I have issues with dress. Nothing about the assemblage says Mahdist Period to me. The cross guard could come from any lot of bronze cross guards. The leather rap looks cracked and likely recent. Kaskara pommels are traditionally wooden discs covered in leather or silver not a mash-up as shown.

I would think any high status person who accessed the great blade would dress it with a higher class iron cross guard and silver mounted grip and pommel.

Best regards,
Ed

[TVV]

Ed, you are absolutely correct that the quality of the fittings does not match the quality of the blade. Interestingly enough, the hilt has a repair to one of the quillons, so the sword's owner at that time chose to have it soldered as opposed to replaced. I can totally see someone with poor knowledge of traditional hilts attempting a "restoration" on a damaged hilt outside of the culture. Or the owner at some point was in a hurry and decided that a crude hilt is better than no hilt at all.

The nicest hilted kaskara I have has a silver hilt with the comet motive. Ironically, it also has the least interesting blade on all of my kaskaras.

Some years ago Kubur showed a couple of interesting swords with very unusual hilts. They both had really nice old blades. It would be great if they came to us with nice silver hilts, perhaps even with the double disk pommels, but more often than not, the best blades reach us in a dress that does not meet our collector's ideal.

[Jim McDougall]

I agree with Ed, the style of dress is atypical of Mahdist period, and seems a privately construed matter using other influenced features or components used to mount an apparently heirloom blade. While the Mahdist period was of course concluded in degree at the end of the campaigns, the ideology and reverence to the Mahdi continued well through the 20th c.

It would seem quite likely that local figures of standing would keep that in mind and wish to have a sword in that light.

[David R]

A man I worked with on a dig in the 70's I knew as "Max" had been assistant district commissioner in the Sudan in the 1920's. Yes the Mahdist were still around, and the tribal culture still present.
Great bloke, and we will never see his like again!
Wish I had spent more time with him, but I was still a boy.

[Pertinax]

A very interesting sword. The blade is from Austria-Hungary, early to mid-18th century. I believe it's a unique example that arrived in the Sahel/Sudan and was later remade using local designs.

[TVV]

Thank you Yuri, it would seem the consensus is for an Austrian blade.