Yemeni Curved Sword
 

this item 's auction completed this morning, sadly i did not win it tho i tried.

it was (nistakenly) listed as a Dha with white metal mounts. i hope the winner was not expecting it to be one ;)

thought it deserved posting here as there seem to be very few pics of curved ones. there was unfortuneatly no pictures of it out of the scabbard.

Would this be a Yemeni psuedoshaska??!!! :)


Seriously, interesting Omani kattara. Dha?????duh!

i find some nice bargains online when they get it wrong. just didn't have enough dosh left today after winning the swordstick i posted here as well. ah, well, ce la vie!

I've seen the blade ... it looked very new.

Take glance at Omani national emblem

I have this similar one in my collection......Omani Kattara/Saif.
Stu

Stu, nice one!
What was that mark? I forget now what we came up with on this blade, was it Caucasian"

Sorry Jim, I don't remember either. I'm sure that someone will come up with the answer! Old age dulls the brain :(

LOL! They say the memory is the 2nd thing to go.....
cant remember what the first was! :)

It's so strange this keyhole stamp is normaly seen on Persian qaddara short swords/ caucasian blades... But the three groves are too far fro the top edge to be a shashka... and stop before the end like an Afghan pulwar... It looks for me ilke a combinaison of things... Fake or crosscultural...

At the end of the 19 century Daghestanis exported their (mostly) Shashka blades to Aravia. I think it was even mentioned in the Elgood's book. The stamp on your kattara does look Caucasian.

I have 2 kattaras: a straight and a curved .

What we have here are Omani Swords. Not Dha... Not Yemeni...but Omani. Ariel, it is impossible to have two swords both called the same from Oman where one is curved and the other is straight. :shrug:

Ariel, good note on that mark. It does seem like that was a Caucasian mark. It always intrigued me on what it represented. I once thought perhaps it might be a monstrance or some sort of religious configuration. I need to find those notes, but Caucasian seems a good possibility.

On the kattaras, I think we found some time ago that there was apparently differentiation in the locally applied terms. The straight blade forms of these are simply sa'if, while these with curved blades are termed kattara.

It is much like the term pallasche reserved for straight bladed swords, while sabre or more descriptive variations refer to curved blade swords.
The name game is the bane of our understanding of terms for arms, and often commonly used terms are confounding when trying to establish logic or reason.

I think if anyone, at the risk of their sanity, took on the daunting task of cataloguing and trying to explain the spectrum of terms and words describing edged weapons in their various contexts, it would be astounding .
Naturally they would have to navigate through the maelstrom of transliterations, colloquial slang and nicknames and most confounding of all, the web of 'collectors terms'.

Salaams Jim, That is very interesting... Could that mark be from the Caucasus? I have it down as a Ras al Khaimah produced weapon...Naturally so that a hilt of this form could be built around it ...the weapon must have had an elongated tang and pommel added. I wondered if the mark you call a keyhole mark is in fact a geometrical God is Great format?