Possible Armenian sword for comments

[AvtoGaz]

Originally Posted by Turkoman.khan

I don't think this is an "Armenian sword". In my opinion, such “swords” were used by the Kurds, who possibly lived on the territory of modern Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Some of these weapons have Armenian writing on them, for example see the one in Tirris book (I am away from home so forgive that I don’t have the page number currently).

My best guess is that these items (To date I have seen Kindjals, Shashkas, Shamshirs, Yatagans, and Big Kindjals ie the 1.5 meter long ones) with this style of decoration, usually consisting of really cheap koftgari work and illegible Armenian and sometimes Arabic inscriptions. My best guess is these items come from somewhere in South East Transcaucasia, perhaps Zangezur and Lachin where many Kurds lived. It may have been used by both Armenians and Kurds. Kurds in this region did not have anything close to a good relationship with Armenians, due to their completely sedentary lifestyle and different religion Armenians were the favorite target of Kurdish animal robbers and this was very widely reported as the main social relationship between Armenians and Kurds. As such I highly doubt they would decorate their weapons in the Armenian script as they simply had no love for Armenians, not to mention they were a nomadic people who just didn’t have the infrastructure to be able to engage in such crafts.

The only issue is I have never seen any such weapons in Zangezur today nor are they mentioned type of ethnographic literature. Ethnographic literature about this region states that every household had at least a Kindjal dagger, curved saber, and miquelet rifle that was used for self defense, hunting, and other rituals. This certainly lines up with what you can find there in museums, its all just the basic Caucasian arsenal close to what was used in Kakheti for example.

Maybe these items come from somewhere else, Garadagh in Iran was my second guess. It would be really helpful if a museum that has one or these in their collection could provide a full report on the items provenance.