What is this pamor?

[A. G. Maisey]

Jean, I do not think that this pamor can be sumur bandung.

The round areas in sumur bandung are empty, that is they do not contain pamor, but have been created by forging out a pimple in the blade, removing the pamor while that pimple is raised, and then forging the blade flat again. Usually this pamor has only 3 or four empty round areas on each side, I have heard it can have more, but I've never seen this.

Now, if we look at your blade, the round areas have been created by either one of two methods, they have either been punched into the blade surface, or ground into the blade surface, and then the blade forged flat again, but importantly, in most cases they have been allowed to retain pamor within the depressed area.

I suppose we could say that it is an imperfect sumur bandung, because of retention of pamor, or we could say it is an imperfect banyu tetes because in a couple of cases the pamor has not been retained. But then we have the number of round areas, which is one hell of a lot of circles for sumur bandung.

There is another problem with this pamor, when it comes to naming:- if we look at the flow of the grain, we can see that not only has a round punch ( or grinding ) been used, which is the usual process with banyu tetes, but it is possible that when the blade was forged flat again, a square punch was used to bring the blade back to flat surfaces. This is a variation in process from a simple banyu tetes process, so it is entirely possible that the maker was trying to create something new.

The visible lack of pamor depth in one area of the sorsoran was caused by the fact that that area of the blade had a badly centered core, and during the making, the maker was either lazy or insufficiently skilled to recenter the core before he shaped the blade. It is not age wear.

I think it was Rassers who theorised that all pamor motifs developed from an original five motifs. This might or might not be so, but what is so is that the older blades invariably have much more simple motifs than the more recent blades. In historic blades any blade with pamor miring is rare. Very rare. Any blades with surface manipulated pamors are also rare. As we move forward in time we find that both surface manipulated pamors and pamors made by miring process become not only more frequent, but also more perfect.

In all Tuban blades, we are looking at quite old blades, and in all genuine Tuban blades the pamors involved are invariably very simple pamors.

Here we have a blade that has some elements of Tuban form, and a pamor that has a number of elements in its construction that were not mastered until the current resurgence in keris making, which did not really get under way until around 1990.

We must never expect that any old blade will look like a recent blade when it comes to the techniques involved in pamor work.