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Old 8th September 2005, 08:49 AM   #8
Marc
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Join Date: Dec 2004
Location: Madrid / Barcelona
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Well, close enough.

Boabdil, the last Muslim ruler in an Iberian Peninsula territory, was the king of Granada, not Sevilla, but it's OK... His kingdom fell in 1492, to the hands of, indeed, Fernando and Isabel (Ferdinand and Isabelle, the Catholic Kings). Anyway, the etymology of moro regarding the denomination of the PI Muslims is spot on, indeed, the Spaniards named them with the same name they used for the Iberian Muslims they were more familiar with. But I think the root for moro in Spanish iis older, from the Latin [/]Maurus[/], which designated some of the bereber tribes/lands since the Roman times and that ended up giving its name to the actual Mauritania, though I think that the name "Morocco" shares the same root, also...

Regarding the Flyssa there, I would attribute it just to a curator's mistake. Not strange, in fact. Let's face it, we around here are quite familiar with the major types of ethnographic weapons, but fact is that there's not that much information about this kind of weaponry around, and if you're given a lot with tens or even hundreds of weapons that have to be classified in a probably relatively short time, with almost no budget, and probably little knowledge of the subject altogether, these things are bound to happen, no matter the curator's good will. Again, the internal mechanisms of the museums are all too human, at the end, some of us know this well...
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