Ethiopian swords

[Jim McDougall]

Originally Posted by kahnjar1

Hi Jim, The Shotel sword is mentioned in Wiki here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotel but does not give a concise origin of the word.
Perhaps if one had a very rough night and woke up in a strange bed it could be called a "Shhotel" if the brain was a bit foggy??
Stu

I saw the Wiki entry also, actually got the note about the 18th c. reference using the term shotel for a carving knife. In this Wiki entry they state that the shotel dates back to these ancient groups in Ethiopia and that they had forces using these weapons and called the forces 'shotelai'. this begs the question were they called this because of the name of the weapon or was the weapon named for the force. That would mean there was a root word involved.


Whatever the case it seems that the term is used in a broader sense for sword/knife etc. much as the situation with many ethnographic edged weapons. We have seen this so many times in these discussions, and we could write a book on the countless misnomers, collectors terms, semantics and transliterations. I was once told by a reliable authority that in many of the Malaysian and Indonesian spheres weapons are called by different terms almost village to village. Perhaps exaggerated of course, but the point is well placed.