Maguindanao twistcore Kris.

[Ian]

Thanks Rob. Key data are missing regarding the dating of kris. This may exist for pusaka kris maintained in families for long periods of time as heirlooms. Even though I have traveled to the Philippines and visited Mindanao a few times, I have not had the opportunity to sit down with a Moro family and talk about great-great-great-grandfather's kris. Those swords are probably out there for some investigator to discover, but that requires a particular entrée to Moro society that I didn't have as a foreigner in a strange land. We may get there eventually.

In the meanwhile, I have been exploring in what way the modern kris was developed incrementally from the Indonesian/Bali keris. My reasoning is that the more features a Moro kris has in common with the keris of 16th C Indonesia, then the older the kris is likely to be. That may be overly simple, but at least it provides a rationale for beginning to date Moro kris.

This requires definitions. What is a Moro kris? I suggest those kris that were made in Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago (and perhaps Palawan) are in this category, but what about Sabah, Brunei, and Sarawak? At one time most of Sabah and Sarawak were part of the Sultanate of Brunei. I would group Brunei kris with Moro kris because of this Brunei Sultanate's longstanding, close ties with the Moros of Sulu (particularly) and Mindanao.

Then what about the "cousins" of Moro kris made in the Malaya States (now Malaysia), formerly the Sultanate of Melaka? I define the Malay kris that resembles some Moro kris as a separate group. The Malay sundang style is usually sufficiently different to warrant a separate classification, but some Malay examples are almost identical to Moro kris. There is another reason to consider the Malay sundang as a separate entity. Malay culture is also a keris culture and has its own forms of keris that continue to be made today. That, in turn, has likely influenced the style of sundang in ways that the Moro kris has not.

Whether the Malay sundang and Moro kris are examples of parallel development, or one departed from the other at an early stage, is unclear. Also, to what extent trade and cross over of ideas may have influenced each over the centuries is hard to know.

Lastly, with respect to trade, I have attached a map of some of the trade routes in SE Asia during the period from 1200 to 1450 C.E. There was a lot of commerce happening in the region before the arrival of Europeans in force.

So this is the environment I'm trying to understand from an historical perspective, while thinking about how the "Modern Indonesian Keris" was transformed into a Moro kris over the following centuries.

While there are some similarities between "early" Moro kris and the keris, there are some important differences too. Some of these may be put down to style, but others are clearly functional and developed from practical experience. Indeed, there are so many major and minor changes from keris to kris that these changes must have occurred over a substantial period—I would suggest several centuries.

I'm in the process of trying to document what all these changes are and in what sequence they may have occurred. I'm looking at online pictures and my collection of kris as primary sources of information. It is a time consuming process!

Regards,

Ian
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