Origin of yataghan, shashka etc

[Rivkin]

To be completely honest, I did not like Nakov's thesis, sorry. None of his advisors really knows the subject, nor did he work with Astvatsaturjan/Gorelik. It seems that his goal was to prove autochtonous, preferrably circassian, origin of basically all caucasian weapons. Which may or may not be the right thing to do.

Concerning yataghans and shashka descending from the "bones", I think everyone thought something like this, but as a continuation of bronze/iron age tradition to put "bone" like ends on dagger, which Gorelik shows many times in "Oruzhie Vostoka...", as far as I remember, he even talks about this as a general tradition with symbolism and so on. Such "eared" dagger has been going all around the place, ending up in medieval times as a european "eared" dagger, which existed also in early Ottoman territories/Caucasus (here I hope to be corrected by people specializing in this period).

The problem with Nakov's constant "flynt thingy/modern weapons" is ofcoarse the lack of anything in between. He somehow managed to talk about katars, katanas and bone daggers, but even proto-meotic/colchidic cultures are basically skipped.

P.S. Now, Kochkarev's thesis is raw power .