Dagger ID - unknown date and culture

[E Farrell]

Originally Posted by laEspadaAncha

The blade form and overall proportions look Hausa to me, though variants of the same general form appear across a wide swath of Africa from West Africa to the Sudan, and this could as easily be from the latter as the former - I'll be interested to see what others have to say.

Have to admit though, the (Indian-looking?) enamel pommel is new to me...

Cheers,

Chris

Cheers; I'll start looking around Africa in more depth. East Africa is pretty much the world's major source for copal, so somewhere in the general vicinity wouldn't be too shocking.

Do you think Manding might be plausible? A brief google through Africa brought me back to http://vikingsword.com/vb/showthread.php?t=15571

That's an infinitely nicer example, but similar decoration of the blade and broadly similar handle profile.


One of the areas I have been looking at is central Asia, some of the old Soviet bloc countries. There's a tradition of enamel on dagger and knife handles there that I can't really find elsewhere, but none of it really looks right.


That said, there is a good chance of the enamel being southeast Asian; as you say, it looks like something from the area. The problem then would be how it ended up on the knife. If it is African, it's perfectly possible that the enamel pieces were traded in and used on the knife originally. But the collector who owned this prior to the anthro department drew pretty widely from India, and could easily have added something. My problem there is just how difficult it is to tell a poorly made fake from a poorly made original.