Review of "Arms and Armour from Iran" by M. Khorasani

Rivkin · 15th November 2006, 07:41 PM

First of all I must acknowledge that historically me and the book’s author, Manoucher Khorasani are not on the best terms. I will not comment on the reasons behind it and unfortunately the thread that started it, on Armenian kings have been deleted. In light of this I would ask you to treat this review with a grain of salt. I have made an attempt to insure an independent review for my review, but certain rude and erroneous assumptions were drawn concerning my nationality (not entirely without my fault) and my commercial interests, so this idea has died.

Please also understand that I am obviously not an authority in the field, so me reviewing this book goes against the well established policy when the review is performed by someone of a higher status than the author. Please understand that I may be wrong, and I review this book as myself, and not in any official function. I also apologize that since I have not spent too much time writing this review (and cited the sources mostly by memory), I do not offer an extensive analysis of the book.

First I would like to start with an apology to the author, Manoucher Khorasani. A lot of things I feared concerning his book are not true, and it was highly presumptuous of me to assume that some of the most politicized discussions we had over the years would be transformed by Mr. Khorasani into this book.

I will start with a short summary of my opinion on this book and its positive sides.

I believe it is to be an excellent introductory text on Persian Weapons. It is written in such a way that it is accessible to a wide audience, and gives you a brief overview of all weapons associated with Iran, with short, but important statements concerning their possible use and function. This is being illustrated by many pictures made of pieces that mostly belong to prominent Iranian Museums and therefore inaccessible to many of us. The weapons shown are of varied quality, from that of prominent Kings to those of servants, even though there is a slight overrepresentation of the first kind. However this overrepresentation does not mean showing a lot of jewel-encased parade swords, but rather functional military blades of very high quality. It is a very interesting book which will give you the basics of virtually every aspect of Iranic weapons, whether this would be the references in famous manuscripts, the use by martial artists, native words and attributions used to describe the weapons, and, finally, the weapons themselves. I would strongly recommend buying this book to everyone who starts researching or collecting Iranian weapons.

The information contained in this book is truly enormous, and one can only imagine how much of very hard work came into publishing this book. An argument can be made that this book is more pricey than others in the field, but if one is to use commercial terms, this book can be bought instead of a number of other books: basics of wootz and Damascus steel, Iranic weapons from bronze to age to late XIXth century, basics of archery, bows and arrows, many examples of textual references demonstrating the change in the attitude people had towards weapons throughout the time, all of it can be to some extent learned from this single book.

However, if we are to exceed the basic level and to look at the details, we can see a number of problems, as discussed below. While each of these issues I will illustrate with just a few quotes, all of them are very general in nature, and appear on a very regular basis, i.e. it is not a typo here or misquote there.

The first problem is that the author very extensively quotes from a very few books, quite general in nature, almost entirely ignoring the publications in academic journals. Let me show what I mean by taking just 3 pages as an example:
Pages 130-132 discuss the origin of the curved swords.
Discoveries at Galiat, Saltovskaja culture, the sword of Charlemagne, Khazar Kaganat and Alans is what one expects to find in any material related to the sabre’s origin. Instead we have only brief mentioning of Alans here and the discussion evolves into very strange statements like (p.131) :”However, in a sense, Kobylinski is right to doubt that the Turkish people where the original inventors of the curved sword since forging technology demands urbanization, and that poses a variety of challenges to Steppe people…” and a very long discussion of Chinese weapons. These and following statements are very strange in light of massive evidence of sword production by Steppe cultures, starting with Al-Bukavi, Al-Mukkadasi about Volga Bulgars’ sword (one has to mention that there are alternative interpretations) to nearly any professional work on Steppe nations, summarized by Gorelik in his recent interview “Nomadic tatars lost the ability to produce weapons as late as XVI-XVIIth century, while mongols did not”, followed by the reference to relatively recent Kalmykian production of armour and cannons. Instead the production moves to large cities like Kazan (but yet again even in Khazar Kaganat there were semi-settled areas like Ittil). Second, again, one needs to understand the differences between Alanic, Khazarian, Proto-Hungarian and Proto-Circassian(?) cultures, which includes acknowledging their sabres and clearly stating how they were dated and probably even addressing the question of who is likely to be the first of them to create the saber, based on archeology. Speculative discussion of Chinese and Mongol weapons is clearly out of place here. In all not a single archeological paper, even review ones in English by V.N.Kaminsky or in German by Vinogradov are referenced here, nor the recent book of Astvatsaturjan (Oruzhie Narodov Kavkaza). Instead the entire discussion (as much of this book) is based on a few works by Lebedinsky, Kobylinsky, Allen and Gilmore, and David Nicolle. It is highly surprising that relatively late graphic evidence as presented by David Nicolle is widely addressed but only a single, very late, excavated sword, dated to IX-Xth century, is mentioned. What follows is a number of statements based on the famed manuscript “Manaqib al-Turk” concerning the use of curved sabers by Khorasanis, whom author, following David Nicolle, defines as “Persian troops of the so called Khorasanis”. Again, if one starts to talk about Manaqib al-Turk and Khorasanis one has to give the variety of interpretations of who these Khorasanis where – from one based on the statement in Manaqib al-Turk that they speak the language similar to that of turks, to the one which identifies them as Arab colonists. Again, the relevant research articles by Togan, Sheshen should have been cited here. As part of such tendency, the author, outside of the part on ancient bronze, ignores the archeology (for example, the whole archeology of Caucasian kindjals), substituting it with observations drawn from Persian miniatures.

The second problem is that there are a lot of statements where instead of a reference to some scientific article or book, the author inserts that it is “author’s observations”. For example, on page 214 it says (concerning qames) “… stemmed from the Circassian parts of Iran”, with a footnote to this: “Note that Iran lost much of its territories in the North to Russia during Qajar period (author’s observations)”. These and other similar statements are somewhat strange – I can think of no time when Circassia was part of Iran, nor therefore the time when it was lost to Russia by Iran (the ownership of Circassia was traditionally claimed by Krimean Girey family or Ottoman Empire, with not a lot of factual support in either case). Also these statements about territories lost to Russia are being repeated throughout the book, with no reference that by the time of Russian conquest almost all of these territories severed any ties with Iran, the process that gained momentum with Nader-Shah’s defeat in 1741 by Dagestani confederation. A lot of arguments in this book include assumptions that are questioned by the author, like on page 136-137 a few shamshirs are shown with the following words: “Judging by the curvature of their blades, it can be assumed that highly curved swords were, indeed, in use even prior to the Safavid period, provided that these Shamshirs truly belong to the Timurid period”. It better to phrase such and following statements as the possibility that “highly curved swords…”, rather than as “it can be assumed”. A lot of properties of Iranian blades are illustrated with what I would consider to be questionable (i.e. derived from folklore) stories. A lot of statements require much more extensive documentation (like in the part on Damascus, what was exactly made by Anosov and how it was different from the work of later “bulat” makers; “Rusi” are actually far more likely Viking (it is suspected this is the way they were called in early Arabic literature) than Russian swords, and many-many other things in the same Chapter), instead the author simply extensively quotes from other (not necessarily reliable) books.

The third and the biggest problem is that the author does seem to spend very little time addressing the differences between Persian weapons per se and that of Caucasus, Ottoman Empire and others. While it is acknowledged that there was a significant exchange between all these nations and artisans, as well as warriors, were constantly moving from one place to another and therefore obviously a lot of Persian weapons did not originate in Persia, he offers virtually no key to how differentiate between Persian and non-Persian items. For example when it comes to qamas (kindjals), he makes a statement that Persian kindjals usually do not have metal scabbards, while Caucasian sometimes do, but for most part does not address the differences beyond that. In fact there are a lot of them – the form of the pommel, the method of decorations, shape, metal, all is different, albeit to some extent similar. This problem goes way beyond qames – for example, on page 143 it is stated that Ivanov believes that a given Shamshir is not an Iranian based on signature and shape. One needs better arguments, than given here, to show that it is Iranian, and say not an imitation. Two pages before that there is a shamshir from Oruzheinaja Palata, Moscow collection; without an inventory number or far better photographs I can not be completely sure, but I think this one was taken into the collection as that of Persian work, but Circassian construction (which accounts for the differences with respect to more “Persian” types). There is no statement about this in this book.
In all I believe that there is a number of Ottoman, Kubachi, Uzbek, may be Georgian pieces that are present in this book, however because of the problem that is cited in the next paragraph I can not be sure. In order to explain the differences one should have spoken about floral motifs, their connection with China, Silk Trade, and Armenian Migration, their differences in Dagestan, Iran and Ottoman Empire, their symbolism, the difference between Dagestani and Iranian Koftgari techniques, the difference in the approach to make fullers, the difference between Tiflis stamped maker’s mark, and those made in Iranian Azerbaijan, finally one has to show how the popular attributions to Abbas-Mirza, Shah Abbas, portraits on the blades and so on, differed between Iran and surrounding countries (surprisingly there are a lot of “Abbas-Mirza” blades that are coming from Caucasus). Also, some but very little effort is made with respect to post-Sassanid blades to identify where exactly they are coming from inside Iran (i.e. which weapons are more characteristic of Azerbaijan and so on), or what nationality/tribe where the people who made them. Also, I would strongly disagree on time attribution given to some pieces.

The last problem is photographs. A lot of them are dim and improperly color balanced, but worse of all – the photographs of entire swords are usually made so small one can barely see the details, while they are accompanied by many big blow ups of the blade fragments, that are virtually identical to each other. There are horrible amounts of photographs, but most of them are barely legible – the number of photographs should be cut down by a factor of 3, but they should be bigger.

As a conclusion I should state what I believe to be the reason behind all these problems. The book attempts to cover the weapons of a huge Empire over a colossal time range, something that would demand either a freak genius who knows it all, or, more likely, a co-authorship or at least editing by many highly respected scientists, specializing on ancient Iran, Sassanids, Central Asia, Caucasus, early Islamic Rule , Safavids, Qajars and so on.
Instead the book reverts to very extensive quoting from a few texts (Feuerbach, Wulff, Lebedinsky, Nicolle, Ivanov, Zakey and others) with virtually no acknowledgement of research articles, sometimes with missing discussion of the primeral sources, based on which the above mentioned authors formed their conclusions. Sometimes it seems the writing was done without a very deep understanding of the topic, resulting in a very large number of imprecise statements that can either cause misrepresentations, or can be even considered as errors.
Part of the reason is probably that none of the Editors is known as a prominent collector or researcher of Iranian weapons, or even a prominent expert on Iranian history. Only one of the editors has a Ph.D. (in Virology), but many specialize in Chinese or Japanese weapons and martial styles (which explains out of place references to Chinese and Japanese weapons).

It is a very interesting and valuable book, but it fails as an advanced material.

15th November 2006, 07:41 PM	#1
Rivkin Member Join Date: Dec 2004 Posts: 655	Review of "Arms and Armour from Iran" by M. Khorasani First of all I must acknowledge that historically me and the book’s author, Manoucher Khorasani are not on the best terms. I will not comment on the reasons behind it and unfortunately the thread that started it, on Armenian kings have been deleted. In light of this I would ask you to treat this review with a grain of salt. I have made an attempt to insure an independent review for my review, but certain rude and erroneous assumptions were drawn concerning my nationality (not entirely without my fault) and my commercial interests, so this idea has died. Please also understand that I am obviously not an authority in the field, so me reviewing this book goes against the well established policy when the review is performed by someone of a higher status than the author. Please understand that I may be wrong, and I review this book as myself, and not in any official function. I also apologize that since I have not spent too much time writing this review (and cited the sources mostly by memory), I do not offer an extensive analysis of the book. First I would like to start with an apology to the author, Manoucher Khorasani. A lot of things I feared concerning his book are not true, and it was highly presumptuous of me to assume that some of the most politicized discussions we had over the years would be transformed by Mr. Khorasani into this book. I will start with a short summary of my opinion on this book and its positive sides. I believe it is to be an excellent introductory text on Persian Weapons. It is written in such a way that it is accessible to a wide audience, and gives you a brief overview of all weapons associated with Iran, with short, but important statements concerning their possible use and function. This is being illustrated by many pictures made of pieces that mostly belong to prominent Iranian Museums and therefore inaccessible to many of us. The weapons shown are of varied quality, from that of prominent Kings to those of servants, even though there is a slight overrepresentation of the first kind. However this overrepresentation does not mean showing a lot of jewel-encased parade swords, but rather functional military blades of very high quality. It is a very interesting book which will give you the basics of virtually every aspect of Iranic weapons, whether this would be the references in famous manuscripts, the use by martial artists, native words and attributions used to describe the weapons, and, finally, the weapons themselves. I would strongly recommend buying this book to everyone who starts researching or collecting Iranian weapons. The information contained in this book is truly enormous, and one can only imagine how much of very hard work came into publishing this book. An argument can be made that this book is more pricey than others in the field, but if one is to use commercial terms, this book can be bought instead of a number of other books: basics of wootz and Damascus steel, Iranic weapons from bronze to age to late XIXth century, basics of archery, bows and arrows, many examples of textual references demonstrating the change in the attitude people had towards weapons throughout the time, all of it can be to some extent learned from this single book. However, if we are to exceed the basic level and to look at the details, we can see a number of problems, as discussed below. While each of these issues I will illustrate with just a few quotes, all of them are very general in nature, and appear on a very regular basis, i.e. it is not a typo here or misquote there. The first problem is that the author very extensively quotes from a very few books, quite general in nature, almost entirely ignoring the publications in academic journals. Let me show what I mean by taking just 3 pages as an example: Pages 130-132 discuss the origin of the curved swords. Discoveries at Galiat, Saltovskaja culture, the sword of Charlemagne, Khazar Kaganat and Alans is what one expects to find in any material related to the sabre’s origin. Instead we have only brief mentioning of Alans here and the discussion evolves into very strange statements like (p.131) :”However, in a sense, Kobylinski is right to doubt that the Turkish people where the original inventors of the curved sword since forging technology demands urbanization, and that poses a variety of challenges to Steppe people…” and a very long discussion of Chinese weapons. These and following statements are very strange in light of massive evidence of sword production by Steppe cultures, starting with Al-Bukavi, Al-Mukkadasi about Volga Bulgars’ sword (one has to mention that there are alternative interpretations) to nearly any professional work on Steppe nations, summarized by Gorelik in his recent interview “Nomadic tatars lost the ability to produce weapons as late as XVI-XVIIth century, while mongols did not”, followed by the reference to relatively recent Kalmykian production of armour and cannons. Instead the production moves to large cities like Kazan (but yet again even in Khazar Kaganat there were semi-settled areas like Ittil). Second, again, one needs to understand the differences between Alanic, Khazarian, Proto-Hungarian and Proto-Circassian(?) cultures, which includes acknowledging their sabres and clearly stating how they were dated and probably even addressing the question of who is likely to be the first of them to create the saber, based on archeology. Speculative discussion of Chinese and Mongol weapons is clearly out of place here. In all not a single archeological paper, even review ones in English by V.N.Kaminsky or in German by Vinogradov are referenced here, nor the recent book of Astvatsaturjan (Oruzhie Narodov Kavkaza). Instead the entire discussion (as much of this book) is based on a few works by Lebedinsky, Kobylinsky, Allen and Gilmore, and David Nicolle. It is highly surprising that relatively late graphic evidence as presented by David Nicolle is widely addressed but only a single, very late, excavated sword, dated to IX-Xth century, is mentioned. What follows is a number of statements based on the famed manuscript “Manaqib al-Turk” concerning the use of curved sabers by Khorasanis, whom author, following David Nicolle, defines as “Persian troops of the so called Khorasanis”. Again, if one starts to talk about Manaqib al-Turk and Khorasanis one has to give the variety of interpretations of who these Khorasanis where – from one based on the statement in Manaqib al-Turk that they speak the language similar to that of turks, to the one which identifies them as Arab colonists. Again, the relevant research articles by Togan, Sheshen should have been cited here. As part of such tendency, the author, outside of the part on ancient bronze, ignores the archeology (for example, the whole archeology of Caucasian kindjals), substituting it with observations drawn from Persian miniatures. The second problem is that there are a lot of statements where instead of a reference to some scientific article or book, the author inserts that it is “author’s observations”. For example, on page 214 it says (concerning qames) “… stemmed from the Circassian parts of Iran”, with a footnote to this: “Note that Iran lost much of its territories in the North to Russia during Qajar period (author’s observations)”. These and other similar statements are somewhat strange – I can think of no time when Circassia was part of Iran, nor therefore the time when it was lost to Russia by Iran (the ownership of Circassia was traditionally claimed by Krimean Girey family or Ottoman Empire, with not a lot of factual support in either case). Also these statements about territories lost to Russia are being repeated throughout the book, with no reference that by the time of Russian conquest almost all of these territories severed any ties with Iran, the process that gained momentum with Nader-Shah’s defeat in 1741 by Dagestani confederation. A lot of arguments in this book include assumptions that are questioned by the author, like on page 136-137 a few shamshirs are shown with the following words: “Judging by the curvature of their blades, it can be assumed that highly curved swords were, indeed, in use even prior to the Safavid period, provided that these Shamshirs truly belong to the Timurid period”. It better to phrase such and following statements as the possibility that “highly curved swords…”, rather than as “it can be assumed”. A lot of properties of Iranian blades are illustrated with what I would consider to be questionable (i.e. derived from folklore) stories. A lot of statements require much more extensive documentation (like in the part on Damascus, what was exactly made by Anosov and how it was different from the work of later “bulat” makers; “Rusi” are actually far more likely Viking (it is suspected this is the way they were called in early Arabic literature) than Russian swords, and many-many other things in the same Chapter), instead the author simply extensively quotes from other (not necessarily reliable) books. The third and the biggest problem is that the author does seem to spend very little time addressing the differences between Persian weapons per se and that of Caucasus, Ottoman Empire and others. While it is acknowledged that there was a significant exchange between all these nations and artisans, as well as warriors, were constantly moving from one place to another and therefore obviously a lot of Persian weapons did not originate in Persia, he offers virtually no key to how differentiate between Persian and non-Persian items. For example when it comes to qamas (kindjals), he makes a statement that Persian kindjals usually do not have metal scabbards, while Caucasian sometimes do, but for most part does not address the differences beyond that. In fact there are a lot of them – the form of the pommel, the method of decorations, shape, metal, all is different, albeit to some extent similar. This problem goes way beyond qames – for example, on page 143 it is stated that Ivanov believes that a given Shamshir is not an Iranian based on signature and shape. One needs better arguments, than given here, to show that it is Iranian, and say not an imitation. Two pages before that there is a shamshir from Oruzheinaja Palata, Moscow collection; without an inventory number or far better photographs I can not be completely sure, but I think this one was taken into the collection as that of Persian work, but Circassian construction (which accounts for the differences with respect to more “Persian” types). There is no statement about this in this book. In all I believe that there is a number of Ottoman, Kubachi, Uzbek, may be Georgian pieces that are present in this book, however because of the problem that is cited in the next paragraph I can not be sure. In order to explain the differences one should have spoken about floral motifs, their connection with China, Silk Trade, and Armenian Migration, their differences in Dagestan, Iran and Ottoman Empire, their symbolism, the difference between Dagestani and Iranian Koftgari techniques, the difference in the approach to make fullers, the difference between Tiflis stamped maker’s mark, and those made in Iranian Azerbaijan, finally one has to show how the popular attributions to Abbas-Mirza, Shah Abbas, portraits on the blades and so on, differed between Iran and surrounding countries (surprisingly there are a lot of “Abbas-Mirza” blades that are coming from Caucasus). Also, some but very little effort is made with respect to post-Sassanid blades to identify where exactly they are coming from inside Iran (i.e. which weapons are more characteristic of Azerbaijan and so on), or what nationality/tribe where the people who made them. Also, I would strongly disagree on time attribution given to some pieces. The last problem is photographs. A lot of them are dim and improperly color balanced, but worse of all – the photographs of entire swords are usually made so small one can barely see the details, while they are accompanied by many big blow ups of the blade fragments, that are virtually identical to each other. There are horrible amounts of photographs, but most of them are barely legible – the number of photographs should be cut down by a factor of 3, but they should be bigger. As a conclusion I should state what I believe to be the reason behind all these problems. The book attempts to cover the weapons of a huge Empire over a colossal time range, something that would demand either a freak genius who knows it all, or, more likely, a co-authorship or at least editing by many highly respected scientists, specializing on ancient Iran, Sassanids, Central Asia, Caucasus, early Islamic Rule , Safavids, Qajars and so on. Instead the book reverts to very extensive quoting from a few texts (Feuerbach, Wulff, Lebedinsky, Nicolle, Ivanov, Zakey and others) with virtually no acknowledgement of research articles, sometimes with missing discussion of the primeral sources, based on which the above mentioned authors formed their conclusions. Sometimes it seems the writing was done without a very deep understanding of the topic, resulting in a very large number of imprecise statements that can either cause misrepresentations, or can be even considered as errors. Part of the reason is probably that none of the Editors is known as a prominent collector or researcher of Iranian weapons, or even a prominent expert on Iranian history. Only one of the editors has a Ph.D. (in Virology), but many specialize in Chinese or Japanese weapons and martial styles (which explains out of place references to Chinese and Japanese weapons). It is a very interesting and valuable book, but it fails as an advanced material.