Kurdistan dagger
 

Hello

I've been admiring the simple lines and pronounced central rib of Kuristan daggers and am seeking to add one to my growing collection of miscellaneous ethnographic weapons.

I was hoping someone could comment on this Ebay auction. I started to bid on it, but realized I do not know enough to be confident in an Ebay purchase. This one sold for a low a price which does not fit with prices I have seen with similar daggers in far worse condition.

Ebay Dagger

Was this sale an accurate description of the item? Any advice on what I should be looking for in one of these? I'm wondering if I should be kicking myself for not bidding higher.

Typical and Nice Kurdish Jambiya
 

Dizos, I share your admiration for these daggers and their elegant simplicity. The fittings vary, but the blades are always of very traditional/standard shape and form - slender with central ridge, most are of wootz, and some are of fantastic wootz. Please see this for more:
http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showthread.php?t=4511
This particular dagger is a typical Kurdish Jambiya, and also with quite large blade - over 10'' and nice tooled leather scabbard. The description is very accurate, no doubt. I also think the realized price was on a low side for the complete, well preserved and authentic dagger of about 70 to 100 years of age. It also may be even wootz! Overall - it's a good deal for sure!

Dizos

There are a couple of othe forum members that are kicking themselves also ;) It is an older late 19th century Kurdish jambiya in good shape I think the blade is not wootz due to it's size most of the wootz blades are smaller 7-8 inch range
still it was a steal for $70.

Lew

Lew, you're right.... the larger blades are rare of wootz, but if they are - they are often of the nicest pattern like Kirk Narduban ladder, and the nicest I've seen are quite large- about 10''.
By the way, I know the person who got this dagger, and I'll let you know if it's wootz.

Lew/Dizos,
I had a pleasure of polishing/etching this blade. As I expected (quessed:-), the steel is wootz, but I expected ladder pattern for $70:-)
The coins are Turkish, dated as of 1929, and with Tughras struck on one side. I think they's later addition along with the water buffalo hilt and scabbard. Overall - a spectacular blade - wide, long and in fantastic condition. Lew was right - a steal... I think he meant a wootz steeal:-)

... few more pictures of Kurdish-style daggers (they also can be Persian or Turkish as well !?). All blades are over 10 inches long, and all are wootz (note the lighter quench areas near the hilts). One blade, in the middle, has a spectacular ladder Kirk Narduban pattern.

Alex

Do you hear that strange sound? That's me banging my head against my key board ;) :( :D

Lew

... that is funny, Lew ;)

Alex, this looks amazing. What are your secrets when polishing and etching a blade? How do you polish - very fine sandpaper, or something else? And what do you use for the etch? I would love to get a few tips from you (or the whole manual), as I have a Syrian dagger which exhibits a low-contrast pattern that I would emphasize a little more. Also, when you have a blade in a not so good shape, with heavy patina and pot marks, is there any way to coax a pattern out? I have a damascus yataghan, which exhibits four rows of Turkish ribbon on a small part of the blade, but I have failed miserably in my attempts to reveal the pattern on the rest of the blade.
Thanks,
Teodor

Teodor,
What I've learned is that good quality wootz requires minimum effort to be brought up nicely. Wootz blades which were not polished, grinded and buffed too much during their lifetime have tendency for better contrast when etched. Just like the examples shown above - these blades were in excellent condition, not just well preserved, but not "touched" much. They required almost no mechanical work. All I did was polished them gently with the polishing paste until the surface became mirror-like/shiny, then cleaned it with alcohol and etched with FerroChloride (FeCl) solution. I've worked with good wootz blades with heavy pitting, and when test-etched they were showing good pattern, but when grinded and polished to get rid of pitting - the pattern often lost its contrast and became distorted. I'd strongly recomment NOT to overgrind and overpolish wootz. The goal is to make an entire surface mirror-like without taking too much metal off and without overheating the blade - the less mechanical intrusion - the better! You can use very fine sandpaper with water, then sandpaper with oil, followed by dry sandpaper and buffing, and once the surface looks mirror-like -- stop!
Now, when wootz is low-contrast (especially Turkish or Syrian sham type) - this is how it meant to be by design, and there is not much one can do to increase the contrast, except of trying different etching methods - FeCl, acid, etc. and if it happens to be sham (low contrast wootz) - it'd stay this way:-) Finally, a wootz blade can have areas of pattern loss - different reasons - overheating, overpolishing, underheating:-) Good wootz will always show it's best with almost any etchant, and this is the secret:-) Hope it helps.

I think this is Turkish dagger, however it has some strong Kurdish influence - but the blade has no central ridge. I post it to demonstrate the pattern, which also required no work - just very light cleaning and slight FeCl etch - took 10 minutes.

Alex,
Thank you very much. There is plenty of good advice in your post. Here is the blade in question - I guess it is obvious it will never have a particularly strong contrast, but for some reason I think there is some room for improvement. You can barely see the pattern, but it is there. I did degrease the blade with alcohol and then I soaked it into diluted vinegar for about 12 hours (I tried a few hours only and had no result, so I left it in longer).
What is your opinion, should I try another etch, or this is as good as it will get? I have not polished the blade with anything, I only removed rust months ago with brass brush manually (no power tools).
Thank you,
Teodor

Stunning! Congratulations Alex. It has been really fun to see this go from the Ebay auction to the pictures of this beautiful piece with the wootz revealed. I think I'm hooked on collecting for life now.

!Congratulations Alex! You have a great piece over there, thank you for sharing it. Do you have references of wootz production in the kurd region? Or they imported wootz to forge it?
My best regards

Alex made many excellent points in regards to how different wootz reacts to a polish and etch. A superb pattern would have been preserved by most generations and this is why they are easy to etch because they would have received few polishes in their lifetime when well preserved. In regards to your two pieces just a couple of suggestions. On your dagger which is exhibiting sham pattern I recommend you bump up your etchant from vinegar to the Ferric Chloride. Make sure your blade is well cleaned before applying etchant. You want to remove as much rust as possible. Wipe blade clean with alcohol and then with gloves apply liberally the etchant solution, most dilute 3:1 or 4:1 with water, and continue for several minutes watching closely the blade for any improvement in the appearance of the pattern. Most importantly, you need to neutralize after each etch. A baking soda paste applied liberally to the blade will do fine. Dry the blade well and immediately oil blade. The etchant may leave some discoloration if not washed off and neutralized but this can be easily removed with some metal polish and a soft cloth. You can repeat the process several times to see if you get improved results.

With your twist core yat, one possible way to bring out pattern better, and this requires a lot of patience, is to polish the blade, follow process as mentioned above, rinse and neutralize and then polish blade again and repeat process. You may need to do the cycle 4 or 5 times to really start bringing the pattern out. Remember though, each time you polish(with stones, sandpaper, etc.) you remove tiny bits of metal from the surface. Over long periods of time the original contours of a blade can be compromised from over cleaning. However, this takes decades if not centuries of continued use so a cycle of 4 or 5 times should not be an issue.

Importanlty, as Alex comments, not all patterns are of high contrast. Take sham wootz for example. I have seen a tremendous range of contrast, pattern quality and consistency, ie no dead spots, within this one branch of pattern. So, if the original blade was of low contrast with minimal pattern and maybe forged at a slightly too high temperature resulting in some dead spots, then guess what. The blade is going to be that way today. However, with a blade out of polish, we often do not know until it has been etched. This is why some people will polish a window in a blade because you can focus on one spot, see how it turns out, before investing many hours to bring a full blade back into good polish.

Best of luck with your pieces!

Thank you so much, this is the kind of advice I was looking for.

RSWORD, Thank you for a great sum-up. I've learned a lot from you in the past, and it continues - always appreciate your knowledge and comments.
I agree - the pattern is sham, and FeCl will be a best bet. Sometimes, especially when etching Sham - the surface may turn yellowish. Adding little Nital (2% Nitric Acid solution) to FeCl will help to avoid it.

Also, a great question from Gonzalo. Was wootz produced by Kurds in Kurdistan? Kurdistan was/is part of Iraq, but Kurds historically lived in Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria. and wootz ores were discovered in Persia as well as in Iraq, so my quess is that wootz blades were part of Persian trade, and the fittings were added as part of local "customising". Does anyone has any references/comments about this?
Good luck to all.

Alex, thank you very much for your comment. :) Do you meant iron ores, since wootz a product made of iron, carbon and other igredients? I don´t have a map with the ancient iron ores sites distribution, but it would be interesting to have one and begin to make some inferences.
All my best

Rsword, Alex .. judging from the pattern .. do you think this blade is made from wootz?

Mohd, this is very nice and interesting pattern. The top picture does not look like "classical" Indo-Persian "wootz of legend". It resembles mechanical damascus, i.e. pattern weld - You can see/trace the formed layers of different steels, whereas in wootz the pattern would form in a more random/scattered manner. The other side (bottom picture) actually does look like wootz. Let's see what other members think...

I agree with you Alex. This is a pattern welded blade with nice layering.

Although some pattern welding is so tight that it looks like wootz (which has been discussed before)

Gonzalo, let me venture a guess:

The common knowledge is that wootz ignots were exported from India to the Middle East. Damascus was a main arms production center in Syria, and Isfahan - in Persia. Isfahan in particular was well known to produce arms from locally mined iron ore, and wootz ignots from Khorossan area in Northwest Persia were mined and shipped to Isfahan and other production centers in Persia (the Khorossan is also a name of one of the wootz patterns – “Kara Khorossan” - a darker oilish pattern.)
I do not know if Persian wootz ignots were exported elsewhere, or if there were other ore sources in other regions, but perhaps it explains why Persian wootz is considered to be superior to Indian (and I know that some people will object to this theory, but be it a myth or legend – this notion has been around for a while, so it has to be a reason behing it :)

Alex

Wootz ingots were shippied as far as China and possibly Japan.

Lew

I’d say definitely Japan, this article has photos of several types of imported steel (Nanbantetsu) from the late 1500 - early 1600s and kept in a shrine since, two of them look to be crucible product and have wootz-y chemistry, as far as reported in the article.
日本刀の鍛錬性に及ぼす南蛮鉄のリン含有量の影響
Effect of Phosphorus Content of Nanban-tetsu on Forgeability of Japanese Sword Making
鈴木 卓夫
Suzuki Takuo
Vol.90, No.1(20040100) pp. 43-47
The Iron and Steel Institute of Japan (ISIJ) ISSN:00211575
http://ci.nii.ac.jp/naid/110001457670/en/
(no, I don’t read Japanese, fortunately the photos, figures and tables are in English)
Hyotan and koban in particular look like semi-processed wootz ingots.

The best references I’ve found for mining, sword making and trade info are “Persian Steel, The Tannivoli Collection” with quite a lot of info on metal trade and manufacture in Persia, and “Medieval Islamic Swords and Swordmaking” the new translation of al Kindi’s 9th Century description of where and how various swords were made, he specifically mentions indigenous production of Khurasani swords; I think that is called Kurdistan now, NE Iraq.

Please excuse me, Alex, and I expect not being making a big disgression, I did not understand the reason why persian wootz is considered superior to indian. It has been said that Damascus was importer, and latter producer of wootz. In relation with your beautiful khanjar, I was thinking if there are some reference to other centers of wootz production, though I see that you consider that the blade was a trade one from Persia, I´m sure for some good reason. I don´t have information about Kurdistan production of minerals and weapons, except for the khanjars I use to find on the web, and the wootz as a subject, is of great interest for me. If you can give me some orientation to this respect, I will appreciate it very much.
My best regards

Gonzalo

Jeff, sorry, I was writting my post and I didn´t see yours. You have some good responses to my questions, thank you.
Regards

Gonzalo

No problem, Gonzalo ;)
My suspicion is that Persian wootz has the better reputation because it has a large scale grain and high contrast, so people can see you've got wootz from across the room, the Indian variety is less flashy. These days, we might just call all the large-grained stuff Persian even though we don't really know where it came from...
:shrug:

FerroChloride
 

It is possible to buy a large range of "chemicals" locally :D , but I cannot find anywhere to buy FerroChloride. I have tried various internet searches without success. I have 3 of these knives and am itching to try and clean them.
Does anyone in the UK know of a supplier please.

Thanks
Royston

ferric Chloride is used to etch copper circuit boards. Try a good electronics supply house