Help wanted Identification of Katars

[Jens Nordlunde]

It will be interesting to see who else has Indian weapons with arsenal marks. Here is one, also with dot markings, the same kind of markings can also be found on tulwar blades.

Some armouries marked their weapons, others not. The marking itself does not tell much about the weapon, other than it has been in the armoury at one point. The weapons in an armoury can be from many places, like weapons from the armoury in Bikaner, can be from Bikaner, but they can also be from a lot of other places in India, like maybe Orissa. If the Rajput’s had been fighting in Orissa and won, they would have taken the weapons home with them and stored them in the armoury, and the arms would be marked with the armoury mark. A thing which must be remembered is, that the one who marked the weapons, most likely, could neither read nor write, so he had to make the marks after a drawing, maybe made by someone who barely could read and write. After having marked a few hundred, with thousands waiting to be marked, it would be natural if his ‘handwriting’ got scamped. This all leads to, that it nowadays is very difficult to read the markings, and only few of the arsenal markings are known to have belonged to certain arsenals.

Hi Rick, not that I know of. The reason, or some of the reason, will be like mentioned above - but maybe some day.