Help needed identifying shamshir wootz blade

[ALEX]

Originally Posted by Arthur.Rothschild

... It’s worth to mentythat this sword is Neither authentic work to Asad Allah neither the stamp is real...

The cartouches and inscriptions on the blade in Post 1 and 11 seem to be proper, authentic and contemporary to the blade. Whether made by AssadAllah himself or not is something that cannot be claimed with certainty. Most authors describe such blades as "bearing AssadAllah maker mark". Labeling all such cartouches as non-authentic/not-real would be inaccurate and improper.. unless they are obviously modern made and/or on modern blades.

[ariel]

And yet another resurrection of the topic!
I love it.


AFAIK, no new evidence for or against physical existence of an Abbas-era swordmaker named Assadulla had surfaced in the interim. We are back to our deeply held beliefs about the role of a single personality in history.



Meanwhile, Israeli archeologists find one evidence after another pointing to a historical figure of King David. The latter was hotly “disproved” by a modern bunch of deconstruction specialists.

Absence of evidence is the evidence of absence: somebody may still find a shred of old paper mentioning Assadulla by name. And recently,a very smart guy named Kamil Khaidakov from Moskow reported Shamshir blades with deep stamps of Assadulla on their tangs. Something to think about.

BTW, The Iliad was written not by Homer, but by another ancient blind Greek poet ( or a commune of them) :-)

[mariusgmioc]

Originally Posted by ariel

Absence of evidence is the evidence of absence: somebody may still find a shred of old paper mentioning Assadulla by name. And recently,a very smart guy named Kamil Khaidakov from Moskow reported Shamshir blades with deep stamps of Assadulla on their tangs. Something to think about.

BTW, The Iliad was written not by Homer, but by another ancient blind Greek poet ( or a commune of them) :-)

Hello Ariel,

As I am not a native speaker, I may have misunderstood your message.

However, absence of evidence is NOT evidence of absence.

I will illustrate my argument with a single example (albeit there are many) inspired by you.
For decades scholars argued there is absolutely no evidence for the existence of Troy, and that Homer's poems Iliad and Odyssey are purely fictional creations...
... until one individual with absolutely no theoretical background took the two poems for EVIDENCE and started digging. And he found Troy.

Now there is another issue I want to bring up. WHAT IS "EVIDENCE?" Is an inscription on a sword saying "Work of XXX" evidence for the existence of the respective swordsmith? And here, we can argue ad nausea because what is evidence for some, can be rejected by others. However, based on my own common sense, I believe that we can make a rationally valid assumption that there existed a certain swordsmith named XXX. Now, whether he made the respective sword himself or a later imitator, is another issue but the mere existence of immitators I see as a confirmation of the assumption that at a certain moment there existed a swordsmith XXX. If he had not existed, why would his signature be immitated?

My two cents...