Origin of yataghan, shashka etc

[ariel]

Originally Posted by 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 .

Agree: it is a rather weak dissertation. He used very small number of weapons ( only one actual shashka and another one was Russian military, a couple of broken knives etc). His main thrust was the usage: how the weapons were constructed for actual draw, handling etc. A good chunk of the dissertation are his personal impressions, stories how he almost sprained this wrist, how he made a bone dagger in half an hour etc. The guy worked in a very poor environment ( Nalchik aint't no Harvard!). However, I liked his impertinence, how he tried to compensate for the lack of resources with imagination, how he used meager material.
I would give him a credit for that. He must be a nice kid.