San Marco ! I'm in Venice 4/5 times each year, but I always saw at the
"pala d'oro" with "Cristo Pantocratore" the few times I was in the Basilica. Didn't noticed that dagger. I always was much more interested in the Palazzo ducale armory and ca' Pesaro japanese collection.
A good piece to dig in. The treasure is usually well documented on where and when it was sacked by the venetian armies. But this might mean noting
about the real age of the item. Seem i'll need help of a specialist in easter weaponry.

My mother maiden name is "Casaroli" and was born in Castel San Giovanni, Piacenza. Google "Cardinal Casaroli" :D

You know, the two oldest lobbies in the world are jews and chatolic priests.
In venice you can find both. You definitively have to go to visit "Ghetto vecio" (the old ghetto). One of the least known and most beautiful sites in Venice.

please dont!!
my girlfriend has constantly reminded me of a fantastic jewish restaurant that we stumbled across in the old quarter. unfortunately, we had just eaten, and we had no time to go back. everytime we walk past even a bagel shop, she mentions it. i am glad she doesnt read this forum!!
your relation seems to have been quite a guy!! the treasures he must have seen having access to the vatican.
i strongly recommend the civic museum on the other end of the square (across from the basilica). they have a couple of room of captured turkish weapons of outstanding quality and rarity. the museum is not known, and the weapons not mentioned in any guide.
please do try to get images of the dagger, as it would be a wonderful piece to talk about here.

Just in front of S. Marco ? Should be the Museo Correr.
The responsible for all museums in Venice has her office there and you have to fill a form and have her signature on it to take pics from everywhere. I've made it several times for the Ca' Pesaro japanese collection but never sen the pieces you're talking about. So sad that Museo Correr has no catalogues on such items.

it was indeed the museo correr. search the forum for a post called 'hidden room 2' for images i took. found out that the basilica dagger has been published twice, but not in english. will find the references next week.
kirill, apologies for diverting and hijacking your post.

1. I did offer someone to coauthor the review, but we had a much too violent disagreement on whether "iron" is a variation of "iran" (as he believes), or, as per Abaev, Oranevsky :") and others one must consider an autochtonous origin. However, I did email prior to the publication a copy of this review to some forumite, mostly those who liked the book.

2. I have been interested in the subject for a while, so I did collect some references. I am however not a specialist (sorry for repeating), so I did expect that for example Dr. Feuerbach, who actually _did_ work with alanic weapons would find some error in my statements.

3. Actually one of the biggest challenges of working with weapons is that most of the publications, outside of some very old weapons for which one should check the archeology publications, occur often in God forsaken journals. Actually it is very hard to get good information, and I actually have far better references, but I did not include them in the review since they are virtually unobtainable (for example, there is a very good Ph.D. thesis by Nakov) and my use of them for reviewing purpose would be unethical.

4. Concerning weapons in general, we know too little right now. Iranian shamshirs as a type where made virtually in the whole middle east and attributing them can be hard to impossible, I have seen 2-6 pages full of references dedicated to a _single_ controversial sword, simply citing different opinions - what area is this "rumi" style is most characteristic for, what kind of koftgari technique is used (for example in Dagestan they like the koftgari to be elevated with respect to the sword's surface, i.e. the gold writing sticks out of plane). There are a lot of weapons that we know from textual information, but don't know how they look like - for example there is a lot of evidence that in 1600-1730's Karabagh (Azerbaijan/Armenia) was a huge center of arms production of swords and guns by local armenians, something like 3000 muskets per year. The weapons made where distinctive types of shamshirs and straight broadswords (as described by Ivan Karapet and others). Now do we know how these weapons look like, i.e. which of current "iranian shamshirs" come from this area ? Or, for example, can one make some sort of a conclusion from the statement that wide appearance of stamped marks on blades made in Tbilisi, practise quite characteristic of Northern Iran/Azaerbaijan coincides with a start of a massive migration of Armenians from Northern Iran to Tbilisi ?
Or, for example, Arakel Davrizhezi writes that in the time of Abbas II the sharpest and biggest shamshirs were designed to chop lamb's head with a single stroke, and was used by jewish butchers, and therefore if it was discovered in a house of a muslim, such person would be assumed to be a secret jew. Again, what are the shamshirs he talks about ?

I fully understand you.
Ethics is of paramount importance in avoiding a lawsuit by the original writer.
Of the Ph D thesis, of course...
Well, many good words, but just words only to me. As you, I'm not an expert too, and I am not able to make cross references with the information you give.
Thanks anyway for the hard work.

I have been very busy with conferences, publication, teaching, birthdays, Thanksgiving and a horrible cold on top, so I have not been able to digest your review. However, please include all references you know of, I have access to Interlibrary loan and can often get very obscure articles, even if I have not time to read them (or get them translated).

Well, it would not be ethical to Mr. Khorasani to blame him for not reading some obscue things.

Concerning the literature - you probably know it far better than I do. If you are interested in the obscure stuff, it is:
Kochkarov Umar Usufovich, Ph.D. dissertation, "Vooruzhenie srednevekovogo vsadnika ....",
Nakov Felix Ruslanovich, Ph.D. dissertation, "Cherkesskoe (Adygskoe) Klinkovoe oruzhie"
Shaviev N. A., "Istoriya i kultura kabardinzev ....", Nalchik, 1968
"Sbornik materialov po archeologii Adygei", Maikop, 1961
Concerning review papers I have not mentioned before, for example A.V. Komar, O. V. Sukhobokov, "Vooruzhenie i voennoe delo Khazarskogo Kaganata", Vostochnoevropeisky Archeologichesky Zhurnal, 3 (2000).

and so and so on. But again, you probably know so many more references, especially on early alanic/khazarian things.

Thank you. For my Alani etc info I ask my good friend Irina Arzhansteva, I want her to translate and publish her PhD (Moscow?). It was on the sword styles of Central Asia, she knows so much and has published so little on it.

In my experience getting Ph.D. dissertation copied from Russia is a royal pain until you establish a contact with a secretary/someone working in the library or so. You send them money and they scan it for you; working with department chairs or other high ranking people unfortunately does not work (at least did not work for me). It is a pity that there is a sea of works on early sabres (how can I not mention Gorelik, Kirpichnikov or literally dozens of others), but how much is translated ? Close to zero - a few works here, a few works there. I have approximately half of Kaminsky's review papers (unfortunately these ones are _really_ short reviews) scanned, so I can easily put them here (I am sure he would not mind). I do have some of this Ph.D. thesises also in a scanned version, however I would warn that some of them are not of top quality. They have a lot of new information, but you have to distill it from 200 pages.

Btw is there a chanse of getting Dr. Arzhntzeva's thesis ? I promise my best behavior :). I am slightly confused - is it on alans or on central asian swords/sabres, or on both ? What I mean - alans of which time period are in this thesis ?

Interesting idea
 

Rivkin and Dr Ann:

I would suggest sending Lee Jones a PM about possibly posting scanned works here that are difficult to find. There may be some legal issues of copyright, etc. that need to be worked out. I can't speak for Lee, however I think he would give your idea some serious consideration.

I also believe that we have a couple of native Russian speakers who are active members of this forum, and they might be able/willing to assist in translating key passages.

Without hijacking the present thread, could I suggest that we take this interesting idea to a new thread. :D

ian.

2 weeks after
 

Since no argument was presented, I will try to conclude this story as I see it.

The study of weapons is a somewhat off-mainstread topic. The study of non-japanese and non-military patterns also requires navigation among the sea of rumors, incomplete information, old and new fakes and semi-fakes. Little should be presented as "truth", and the same research can be seen quite differently by different people.

Today, since reading Manoucher's book has influenced me to read a lot of papers and to speak with many people in the past two weeks, I think differently about my review than I did so mere two weeks ago. I would've soften some of the criticism in this review, but I would've also put a bigger accent on some other "issues". My conclusion remains the same - it is a good book, and the author did a good job distilling the information concerning Persian weapons from other books, while combining it with an extremely valuable opportunity for us to see the weapons from Iranian collections. I am thankful for this. However the research provided in this book is questionable. I do recommend it to everyone who is interested in Persian weaponry.

P.S. Just to give you some idea concerning how hard it is to collaborate with other researchers to get any reliable information, one of high level employees at a very good museum, which I visited many times in my life, has answered me publicly that he does not collaborate with "americanos-pedophilos".

Don't bother about what said such a racist fool. They are everywhere...
In Italy we say "the mother of morons is always pregnant..."

I had an experience similar in effect, though very different in substance. I contacted a very well-known academic authority on Southeast Asian archeology, asking if he could recommend reference sources for certain aspects of my research on dha. I received this politely-worded reply:

"As a matter of principle, and in the light of the appalling looting of prehistoric sites in Southeast Asia, I do not correspond with or assist collectors."

No room for argument there, especially since I can't argue with the principle. :o It does make it hard to get ahold of the more obscure reference material in the academic literature, though.