Nomadic swords

[Philip]

Originally Posted by ariel

And here is most likely an example from the Qipchaq armamentarium.
This one is in an unbelievably well-preserved condition: the soil must have been highly "hospitable" for a 10-11 century steel.
Here the tunkou is L-shaped with the longer arm going next to the edge. The last pic shows how it was made: a thin plate of iron was wrapped around the ricasso and the two were forged together. This one is diamond -shaped along the entire length and again, the distal part of the blade is double -edged.

Just thought you'd like to see a polished section of a very similar blade in my collection, was fortuitously preserved with some surfaces including the crisply-defined ridges with virtually no corrosion (albeit with a thick patina) interspersed with the usual pitting. So I polished a "window" on one stretch, and it reveals a distinct and rather attractive lamellar pattern. There does not seem to be any sign of differential heat treating of the edge; the steel offered the same resistance to the whetstone across its width. Indeed the blade, which is thick but narrow and has little if any distal taper, appears to have little resilience since it is bent in several areas.