Persian Shamshir fullering techniques and their Afghan imitations

[Sakalord364]

It’s interesting to compare the Persian blades that have the interesting “U-Turn/Segmented” fullering style which was created in Persia, to the examples which was then copied by Afghan and North Indian smiths to varying degrees of accuracy. I wonder if the Persians were inspired by the fullers on German/Italian export blades, because it it certain that the fullers on Indian blades were often inspired by the many European blades imported into India.

The Afghan copy here imitates a similar Persian blade, however the fullers are much cruder. The Afghan smith likely wasn’t familiar with the exact technique the Persians used to create the fullers, and unlike Persia Afghanistan did not have a massive blade manufacturing industry, it was just individual smiths or small operations making blades for the local population, and this particular smith likely didn’t find it worth the time to spend hours trying to precisely imitate a foreign design like these fullers.