A somalian billao

[Yvain]

Thanks everyone ! It wasn't really a difficult clean-up (mostly old varnish and gunk), but surely a satisfying one !

Teodor, your analysis is interesting, I always thought of the two types as distinct categories (dagger and short sword), but now that I think about it, the short sword ones indeed seems later. Although, having looked into the Quai Branly collections, I suspect there is way more different types of billao than we usually think, I'll need to dig into this one day. In the meantime, we can also point out the existence of later daggers like billao, usually with a shorter but thicker blade, with a simplified blade shape, and almost always with a three pronged pommel.

Martin, thanks a lot for those interesting pictures, old contemporary photographies are in my opinion one of the most important sources we have at our disposition when studying ethnographic weapons !