SWORD FOR DISCUSSION

[Ibrahiim al Balooshi]

Originally Posted by Taffjones

Happy Holidays everybody,
been routing through my collection trying to find an item for discussion and have found this sword. My personal opinion is that it African possibly Mandingo with Arab influences(straight kattara type handle) and the blade could be an english pipe back type blade maybe 1822.Total length in scabbard 91 cm

Thanks in advance.

Darren

Salaams Taffjones ~ Very interesting... This looks like a slavers sword perhaps carried as a badge of rank/office. Forget the plastic it is likely to be a replacement of an original leather corded decoration. I consider that the hilt transferred from the straight sayf in about 1750 a short while after its inauguration as the dancing sayf honorific to the Dynasty Al Bu Said which started in Oman in 1744.
I tie the strong trade link of slavery with the African introduction of the long curved blade across the region (really more to do with German and other European blades then flooding into Africa) For a look at Oman Slave Trading in East Africa please see post #25 on

http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showthread.php?t=10455

Kattara for comments ~ in which I quote Tippu Tip or Tib (1837 - June 14, 1905), real name Hamad bin Muḥammad bin Jumah bin Rajab bin Muḥammad bin Sa‘īd al-Murghabī, (Arabic: حمد بن محمد بن جمعة بن رجب بن محمد بن سعيد المرجبي‎) who was a Swahili-Zanzibari trader of mixed descent. He was famously known as Tippu Tib after an eye disease which made him blind. A notorious slave trader, plantation owner and governor, who worked for a succession of sultans of Zanzibar, he led many trading expeditions into east-central Africa, involving the slave trade and ivory trade. He constructed profitable trading posts that reached deep into Central Africa. One of the major slave hubs being Zanzibar.

I see no reason why swords traded along the slave routes didn't morph, switch and change and I see this as the most likely reason for the long handled Kattara developing from Africa into the Red Sea and Omani spheres because of this trade. I therefor attribute Kattara as African (European blades) coupled to the long Omani hilt after the Straight dancing Sayf(Saif) as a consequence of slave trading in Circa 1750 ad. That date an approximation based on the kick off date of the Dynasty Al Bu Said and the appearance of the dancing sayf.

It should be noted that Tipu Tib was probably not the instigator of the spread of this weapon because he was only born in the early 19th C. (1837)His parental portfolio, however, indicates a load of experience in that part of the world doing the same work and placing them right in the frame for this weapon structure, use and spread)..viz;

His mother, Bint Habib bin Bushir, was a Muscat Arab of the ruling class. His father and paternal grandfather were coastal Swahili who had taken part in the earliest trading expeditions to the interior. His paternal great-grandmother, wife of Rajab bin Mohammed bin Said el Murgebi was the daughter of Juma bin Mohammed el Nebhani, a member of a respected Muscat (Oman) family, and an African woman from the village of Mbwa Maji, a small village south of what would later become the German capital of Dar es Salaam.

"German" Dar es Salaam must have been a key centre through which many Solingen and other European blades passed onto the Arab and African traders, though, after 1887. (See note below.) However ~ tons of blades were already in circulation and Germany was the main provider.

Regards,
Ibrahiim al Balooshi.

Note; For further detail on Dar es Salaam see wiki encyclopedia which expounds ~ In the 19th century Mzizima (Swahili for "healthy town") was a coastal fishing village on the periphery of Indian Ocean trade routes. In 1865 or 1866 Sultan Majid bin Said of Zanzibar began building a new city very close to Mzizima and named it Dar es Salaam. The name is commonly translated as "harbor/haven of peace" or "abode/home of peace", based on the Persian/Arabic bandar ("harbor") or the Arabic dar ("house"), and the Arabic es salaam ("of peace") (cf. "Dar as-Salam"). Dar es Salaam fell into decline after Majid's death in 1870, but was revived in 1887, when the German East Africa Company established a station there. The town's growth was facilitated by its role as the administrative and commercial centre of German East Africa and industrial expansion resulting from the construction of the Central Railway Line in the early 1900s.