[Jean]

Originally Posted by A. G. Maisey

So Jean, in 1985 Harsrinuksmo publishes these drawings, and 2004(?) in EK he publishes the drawings that I posted.

A comparison between both sets of drawing might be educational.

Harsrinuksmo worked with Lumintu. Who actually produced the drawings?

To try to demonstrate that one representation is more correct than any other is just too silly for words --- I know you are not trying to do this --- but here we have varying representations of a very scarce pamor that I might have met with once in my lifetime, in spite of the fact that each time I went to Indonesia prior to 2015 I saw & handled several thousand keris. I cannot help but wonder if anybody is at all certain about this particular pamor.

Haryoguritno lists it, but I don't think he illustrates it.

The simple bare fact is this:- there is a great deal about keris "knowledge" that is not knowledge at all, it is belief, and that belief can be limited to a very small number of people in a single location.

RAR appears to be a rather difficult pamor to make, if the illustration in EK can be taken as accurate it is not something that is produced with a single billet manipulated in just a couple of operations, if EK is correct it is produced by preparing a number of small motifs which are then overlaid, more or less as a montage, one upon the other.


Yep, this new example is an adeg pamor, some people might call it Adeg Lima --- or adeg + some other number --- but then some other people believe that once an Adeg pamor exceeds three upright strands, that adeg pamor becomes Adeg Sapu, adeg = upright, sapu = broom.

Nothing with keris is carved in stone.

Just one little thing that we need to remember when we are dealing with the contents of EK & KJ. The author of EK was a journalist with an interest in keris who drew heavily upon the Jogja belief systems where Javanese keris are concerned, this of course was inevitable because his principal source of information was Lumintu. The author of KJ was primarily a collector with a very great deal of his wealth invested in keris, we might wonder just how many of his elite keris are still in his possession.

My own perspective is that very, very few keris publications that have been produced in Indonesia have been produced solely for the purpose of spreading knowledge.

I know of only one small, limited publication that is totally untainted by obscure objectives and that provides pure, accurate information on the Javanese Keris, and that is the exhibition guide book that was written by Garrett & Bronwen Solyom in the 1970's:- "The world of the Javanese Keris".

With every other publication we need a very high level of knowledge and a very cautious approach, as well as the ability to read Bahasa Indonesia very well, to extract much of worth from the plethora of Indonesian keris publications that has been produced.

Thank you Alan and I agree with you. May I know which pamor pattern would you attribute to the 2 blades which I have shown on the pics of post #9?