Sudan Mahdist daggers

[Aleksey]

Originally Posted by Edster

Iain/Colin,

I've done subsequent research on the origin of the Hadendowa soat'al and it seems that the 1916 attribution is apocryphal. I inquired to the British Badge Forum that showed a badge of the camel corps out of Eastern Sudan. See attached link to the link. Eddie Parks of the forum informed me that a very similar knife to the soat'al had been collected in 1882-83 by Juan Maria Schuver before his death in Sudan in 1883. Unfortunately, the link provided is no longer active. Perhaps others can penetrate the Schuver Collection in the Rijksmuseum Volkenkunde ( National Ethnographic Museum) in Leiden for the image. Its very close in style to the lower knife Colin posted. Very likely the Mahdist period attribution is correct. Note that Colin's grip form is more Nile Valley as opposed to the more emerging "modern" style of Kassala suggested on Schuver's piece. Both blades are pretty much the same.
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http://www.britishbadgeforum.com/for...ad.php?t=25756

Link about Schuver and his travels.

http://volkenkunde.nl/sites/default/...schuver_uk.pdf

Below is a scanned fuzzy image of the Schuver's 1882-83 collection piece.

Regards,
Ed

Let me follow-up the thread!

As for me we need to pay attention to the fact that in Ge'ez (the anceint Semitic language used by Christian priests in Ethiopia for liturgy) the word "shotel" means simply "dagger".

Ethiopian scholar Tewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher (b. 1940) wrote:

To a more limited extent, the dagger (methaht or shotel) and javelin (armah) were also used, as reported for Yifat.(49) The dagger also features in the death of the important warrior, Ahmed Ibn Ibrahim El Ghazi, which was effected by an unnamed poor man in Shire, western Tigray. (50)

http://archive.unu.edu/unupress/unup...human%20rights

AFAIK no depiction of sickle-shaped shotel (sabre) is known before XIX century. The best one is among mural paintings of Ura Kidhane Mihret monastery (Tana Lake) - see the attachement.

In the midst of XVIII century (1751-1752) the Czech Franciscan monk named Remedius Prutky meant shotel several times in his notes about his travel in Ethiopia. But the word was used by him to describe a carving knife.

So I consulted with the scholar (specialist in Amharic and Ge'ez) in the St. Petersburg State University and he told that intially word shotel meant short knife or dagger as Tewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher said.

So could we assume that the word was wide spread across the region meaning the short hooked blade and only in Ethiopia this blade was transformed to the long sickle-shaped sabre? To be honest the Ethiopian-made shotel blades are not so hooked as European-made blades for shotel!