Yataghan Spot the Difference
 

Here's a rum thing...

Can anyone see the similarities in the decoration on the following yats? Hint: Crudely chiselled identical decoration, anomalous inscriptions and illegible maker's marks on blades attached to widely differing hilts...

The relevant yats are to be found in these threads:

http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showthread.php?t=12424

http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showth...light=yataghan

http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showthread.php?t=11535 (this one being mine)

and, at a pinch, : http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showth...light=yataghan

So, of all the yataghans in all the world, three/four from what looks to be the same atelier happen to come on the market at the same time, with completely different fittings? Discuss...

Well i don't see any great conspiracy if that's what you are implying. All these blades have a very similar traditional pattern to be sure, but they are clearly done by different hands at different times with different degrees of workmanship. :shrug:

I'm with David I see no reason to think there is any conspiracy going on here just some old Yataghans from different makers. Maybe since yataghans are become more popular to collect these days we are just seeing more examples for sale.

Rumpel,

Browsing Elgood's latest book, plus the Turkish and Croatian yataghan catalogues, it becomes rather apparent that the blades and hilts for yataghans were not often produced in the same shop or even in the same town. In fact, in many cases there were production centers for the blades, and then those blades were shipped to the various parts of the Ottoman Empire, where they were hilted according to local fashion.

To confirm that all these blades are indeed from the same maker, their dating needs to be within a few years and they all have to be marked from the same maker. Just looking at them, you can see that the stamps are different, so I do not believe they are from the same smith.

Regards,
Teodor

Well, I'm obviously in a minority of one here. What can I say, it's a gut thing?

Certainly, from having read Elgood myself (though not much else), I would have thought it were luxury trade blades, say wootz inlaid with gold calligraphy, swooping across stylistic boundaries for the handles rather than objectively mediocre provincial work.

While I'm not qualified to assess the blades, the calligraphy on, say, the lower three blades seems, to me, identical. That is, the differences between them are attributible to failure of execution rather than variety of intention. While not an Arabic speaker, from the comments kindly placed on the relevant threads, the inscriptions seem unusually anomalous- illegible, or outside the usual tenor or style. In a distinctly unscientific way, when I look at them, I feel the way I do when I handle Derra-made jezails...

Through the half-remembered ghost of anthropological semi-expertise, I'd have said that a long-running traditional style of decoration would be well-represented in published, well provenanced or pre-20th century collections.

I'm a novice, and utterly prepared to accept that my hunch is wrong. That said, I'd be genuinely keen to see any well-provenanced examples of the above decoration any other collectors here might possess, if only for reassurance. I'm thinking of selling the yat and want to do it in good conscience.

Rumpel.

Look this book...
http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showth...BOOK+YATAGHANS
and three more examples.
But it could be very interesting to search and publish someone the arm's workshops. The seals,signatures and designs on blades help i think.

And the lost photo...

Sylektis, thanks for the photos. I guess I should feel reassured, and I do in a slightly red-faced way...

Are those photos from the NHM in Athens, or the Ali Pasha museum in Ioannina? Part of the reason I was wary about the inscriptions is I'd seen many identical ones in that little place off the Flea Market, if you know where I mean. Perhaps too many...

You're right, I think there's a gap in the market for yataghan catalogues of the less-than-pasha quality. In an odd way, I suppose it's exciting how speculative analysis is even on a forum like this.

Anyway, efharisto para poli yia voithia sou me to Yataghani pragmati (sorry, my Greek's appalling... :) )

Here's one more for you Rumpel in post #8. :)
http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showthread.php?t=10672

If you followed the link provided Rumpel you would see that the images in this book come from a museum in Zagreb.

Hi David, sorry, I meant the 1st and last photos Sylektis provided, with the provenance info in Greek next to them- presumably from a Greek museum.

Thanks for the link to the Pandour post. Curiouser and curiouser... I need to get that Zagreb catalogue, I think.

Oh, i see....sorry for the misunderstanding... :)

The 1 and 4 are from the NHM in Athens (also in Elgood book foto 164), the others from auctions.

In all these blades can anyone read dates?