keris jalak with rare pamor
 

Hi all

in spirit of sharing knowledge, here it is another keris of mine.

This keris is simple. What makes it nice is the pamor

I believe this dhapur is known as Jalak Ngore (CMIIW), and this one is not stained properly due to poor storage before

this one has "Unthuk Banyu / Unthuk Segara" pamor

Unthuk banyu means = froth / foam of water / sea water
it is believed this pamor will help in terms of relationship with others

this pamor is unique, apart from it is rarely seen, this kind of pamor along with time and maintenance, the different metal will corrode differently, and producing saw-like edges (can be seen in the pictures)

the "wood" powder you see in the pictures is sandalwood powder

about the age ... say this one has been someone's family heirloom for 30 years, so at least it is 30 years old

first, I have to borrow one pictures of friend of mine in Indonesian forum about similar keris, but thought to be made in 18th century, courtesy of Mr. Hidayat - so comparison can be made

pardon my pics as I took it using iphone

enjoy!!

regards
Donny

Fascinating pamor. Is the this recently made stuff?

Looks like two different pamors to me, first one looks like balls of string ; yes, the second example's style has been done in recent times .

Both are not unknown in newer keris .

Not sure just how much comparison can be made. I agree with Rick, these are not the same pamor patterns. Also agree that Donny's is current era.
Hard to say solely from photos of Mr. Hidayat's example. Lovely current era dress, but i am afraid i don't know how to spot a well made and expertly aged modern piece from the real thing strictly from a couple of photos. While complex pamors of this sort are known to have existed in older blades, well preserved examples such as this are few and far between. It (Mr. Hidayat's) is a beautiful keris regardless. :shrug: :)

I believe so

newly made (kamardikan) in terms of keris could mean somewhere between 0 - 67 years

I agree with you, as with books I attached below, the unthuk banyu pamor is confined within the blade, and in mine, it is becoming parts of the cutting edge.

you mean that the pamor, which like )))((( is the 1st pamor
and the spine consists of another ??

if so, what pamor do you think this keris is ??

if you see this example, http://agenbiteofinwit.com/keris2.html
and according to couple friend of mine, my keris above still categorised as unthuk banyu pamor

but I am agree that there are differences between both blades. Therefore, what pamor do you think it is ??

here's more pics and also a page from my book explaining about pamor unthuk banyu :D

continuing the story ...

this particular keris comes in pair ... there's another one in different dhapur but with the same types of pamor when I bought it

perhaps the previous owner needs popularity so bad as this type of pamor is believed to boost in relationships and popularity :D
pictures will be posted, soon

Your pamor does seem to be closer to the one in the above link.
As to what pamor to call Mr. Hidayat's keris, i couldn't really say. Personally i don't spend too much time trying to figure out pamor names since they tend to sometimes change from era to era, region to region and even village to village. :shrug:

yeah, I know that
but in light of education, I personally tend to use familiar terms in books rather than following local dialects

now this is another keris, which comes with the jalak keris and definitely kamardikan (according to me)

any comment is welcome

From a bladesmith's point of view those two different pamor are quite wonderful. The first one is more difficult to forge than the second.
Well worth stealing those for my own work.
Thank you for posting them.

Ric

You're welcome, Ric

I have seen and held hundreds of keris, and still considered myself a newbie, and this type of pamor is rarely seen, perhaps due to the difficulty in making it

and your comment is similar with my first thought on this keris - how can they made something so intricate, yet so beautiful ... with limited resources compared to modern smiths

that's what driven me to preserve this blade

Perhaps Donny, but i thought we were all in agreement that these examples are made by modern smiths... :confused:

I don't think Hidayat's keris is recent David, I've only ever seen old examples of this pamor, also the style of the blade is an old style. I've got an example of this myself.

Thanks Alan. I wasn't making any serious challenge of this keris in regards to age, merely commenting that my ability to be able to judge the difference between an actual old example of this pamor and a newly made and expertly aged example solely based upon this photograph is basically nil. And it is a beauty regardless. A very intriguing and complex pamor in beautiful dress. In my comment above i was really referring to all the other examples shown which still seem to me to be a completely different pamor pattern than Hidayat's keris :)

agree with you .... to know, we must held it in our hand ... pictures does speak thousand words, but cannot substitute real handling :D

I spoke to my friend, a pande (blacksmith) here in Surabaya, he usually made daggers, dirks and scythe ... and he said that he cannot reproduce the blade or even make a blade with the same pamor ... too difficult he said

Beautiful pamor.

Being able to make such a complex pamor in past days gone must had called for a truly experienced and/or gifted maker.

Very nice :)

Thanks,

J.

Indeed...and good assistants...that is not a one man job.
Keep the pictures coming...you folk have shown me pamor I have never dreamed of...wonderful work.

Ric

Abstract ?
 

Here's a portion of a what I suspect is an uncontrolled pamor on a Wilah attributed to Pak Budi . :)
The black Iron has a couple of shades that I could not bring up with my limited image manipulation skills . :o

A Planned Pamor
 

Presented in honor of its originator .

Wonderful, beautiful and fascinating Keris gentlemen.

Hey Rick,

Whats the deal with that really BLACK stain?
I've got a Keris with a really complex pamor that has a similar very black stain.

Pamor colour depends on four things:-

1)--- material

2)--- the skill of the person doing the stain

3)--- the materials available to carry out the stain job

4)--- the weather


these four factors provide the answer to every variation noted in the colour of stained blades

I think Alan covered it buddy . ;) :)

CMIIW, as I am a newbie in this field, but as far as I know, balinese tend to stain their blade blacker than javanese keris ? my friend here named the style of staining of balinese keris as dongsalibing

the final result is the balinese keris is much darker and smoother than its javanese counterparts

I may be wrong, as I never encounter this information on any books, but from several friend of mine, who are in this field for couple of decades

look at the comparison below, keris bali first, keris jawa second

Alan, Rick, Satsujinken

Thanks gentlemen, I apprecaite the help. It's always a learning curve for me in the Keris section :)

Donny, the reason that Balinese blades often appear to be darker than Javanese and other blades is because Balinese blades do not have a textured surface.

The factors that I have listed do cover the reasons for blade colour.

Here is a link to a blade that I made some years ago.

http://www.kerisattosanaji.com/PBXIImaisey2.html

It is a Javanese form, but a Balinese finish. If I had done a textured finish to the surface of this blade it would not appear so dark. However, some Javanese blades even with a textured surface can be pretty dark, its all about the factors that I've listed. Use the "INDEX" tab on the linked page and and you can see recent blades made by other craftsmen working in Surakarta 20 years ago:- some are very black, others are not.

One thing is true:- you cannot alter the colour of the material with which a blade is made. Most older blades are simply impossible to get really black. Really old blades often have pamor that provides contrast by use of high phosphorus and low phosphorus irons, and all you ever get there is dark grey and light grey.

Moderators:- my apologies for the linked pages, but I do not have these photos on file any longer, and I'm not going to photograph them again.

Understood Alan, but now you are required never to take this page down.
;) :)

I probably will take it down as soon as I have time to do better photos --- which will not be some time soon --- I can now produce better images than these ones, but the replacement page will be the same content as the present one.

if it's up to me, I will send you invitation to come to Indonesia, grant you honorary citizenship, grant you title "living national treasure" and build you a school solely on the study of tosan aji
and will pay you well to pass on your knowledge ...

sadly it's just a dream ...

i love the way you answered directly using technical terms. Nobody ever taught me the composition of pamor made by low and high phosphorus content in iron ... all I know was pamor is mainly made from nickel, some meteorites and so on

this kind of knowledge must be preserved ... do you ever wrote books on keris ? if so, where can I buy one ?

now i would like to ask ... in ancient times, how did empus selected materials for making keris (considering the shortage of good quality iron back then ? is it like making tamahagane for japanese sword, where only the best materials are used for swords - lesser quality ones going to be housewares / gardening tools.

i have tons of questions and I hope you don't mind sparing some time to share your knowledge :D

thank you
regards
donny

on other case, if you haven't heard it

news released only recently in early september 2012

Surakarta will provide IDR 30 billion budget to build Keris Museum
there are some serious talks and the government seemed to be agreeing the proposal

it is planned to be study center for tosan aji, so that this precious heritage may be preserved for future generations (good that indonesians starting to value their heritage)

according to plan - it will be finished in 2015

I certainly hope to see you there someday :D

If you can find the work of Prof. Jerzy Piaskowski of Poland, he did some detailed analysis of old keris blades some time back that details this high and low phosphorous content in iron. The pamor patterns in these old blades did not come from nickel content. Not quite sure where you can get a hold of this research currently, but maybe others can help.

Thanks for the compliments Donny.

Actually I have a pretty long history in Jawa, beginning back in the 1960's. I have known Empu Pauzan Pusposukadgo since 1974, Empu Suparman Supowijoyo (Alm.) was my teacher from 1982 through until the time of his departure, I have passed knowledge that I have to other pandai keris in Indonesia. I have visited Solo most years since 1970 for a minimum of two months each year. One way and another I've got a lot of background in Indonesia.

I knew Jerzy Piaskowski from about 1988 and provided him with cultural background and material for analysis. I have lost contact with him now, and I am afraid that he has probably left us. If he is still with us he would be close to 100 years old. The paper that David mentions is only one of his analyses on keris technology, his most comprehensive was never completed but was published in part by the Japan Metals Institute.I don't think any of Jerzy's work is online anywhere, and probably the only way to get it is to go through a library network.

I myself have written on keris, but only very short papers that deal with the particular aspects that interest me. My interest is cultural and societal, rather than technological, but I do also have a good understanding of the technology. As for a book, it will never happen. Books cost money to write and produce. I have better things to do with my time and my money than write books.

As for selection of materials. There are a number of ways that a skilled smith can use to select material suitable for a tool or weapon. In very early Javanese iron technology it is probable that the indigenous smiths were using tools imported from mostly China to provide the material for weapons, in other words, they knew what they had before they started. However, there was some smelting of iron from beach sands carried out at least in Jawa, and possibly in other places. The material from these beach sands was not of particularly good quality, and it was mixed with the imported material in order to extend the quantity of the imported material This of course resulted in early pamor. A few years ago Dietrich Drescher did some very good work on the technology of indigenous iron smelting, I think there is a paper on his work and results in German.

One test for suitability of an iron for tool and weapon use is to bring it to high cherry, let it cool in air, place it in a vice and hit it with a hammer. If it is high phosphorus or contains some other impurities in excessive quantity it will snap. Apart from that, you can always tell if material is any good as soon as you start to work it. There is a lot of old iron around, material from 100 years ago and more, that is what we call "hot short". A lot of old cart rims are like this. If you try to forge it it breaks up like cottage cheese under the hammer, so you "wash" it (wasuh). You do this by forging out, folding back and welding it a number of times until the billet does not give off sparks at weld heat when it is hit. By that time the volume of material has reduced and the billet is quite dense with no pores or very small pores in the grain. When its like this you can go ahead an use it. In my experience you need to do this fold and weld process around 6 to 10 times before you get the material clean enough to use. Its a similar thing if you work meteoritic material, you need to wash it by folding and welding before its clean enough to use.

In fact, the quality of material used in a keris blade did not need to be particularly high, because a keris is primarily a thrusting weapon, it needs a sharp point, not a cutting edge that will stay sharp. An arit needs higher quality steel than a keris does, because it is a work tool that needs to stay sharp for several hours work without going back to the stone.

The traditional knife used to cut rice was the ani-ani. This is a tiny steel blade in a wooden mount that fits in the palm of the hand. In use it cannot be seen. The story is that this was used in order not to frighten the spirit of the rice. The fact is that to make a bigger blade of the necessary high quality steel would have been prohibitively expensive. This is called making a virtue of necessity.

I have heard rumours about the keris museum, but it will surprise me if it eventuates. The driving force behind the keris revival in Solo was Panembahan Harjonegoro (Go Tik Swan, Alm.), and he passed away a few years ago. Without somebody to drive this idea I doubt that it will come to fruition, simply because there is so much more that Solo needs to spend money on rather than keris. But I could be wrong, and I hope I am.

Thanks, David

I found the title of the book "Technology of Early Indonesian Keris : The Results of Metallographic Examinations of Ganja's (upper Part of the Keris) Separately Forged" ... written by him and Alan :grin ...

unfortunately I cannot find the book anywhere ...

many thanks for the awesome answer ...

I got several points from your answer, that the method is very similar with making japanese sword, with folding and forging to remove impurities.

and talking to you is a whole new story to me, as most of the keris enthusiasts here only knew very little about how a blade was made. They only knew pamor, dhapur, and esoterica regarding keris.

very few know how to make one, simply said, removing slag by seeing whether there's spark whilst hammering is something only empus / tosho / bladesmith knew

now on the topic of making keris, how do empus prevent decarburization of the blade ??

on several blade, say Brajaguna / Brojoguno keris , which said to be specifically designed to pierce armor, had super hard tip and here in Indonesia, we have stupid way to test its strength - it is usually tested using coins (see pic below). If you see the coin pierced, it was an 1973 IDR 100 coin ... and it was made from cupronickel alloy, 1,73 mm thick ... so the keris's tip is indeed very hard

as the metal are heated and folded repeatedly, some carbon unavoidably loss into the air, causing the carbon content within the metal itself decreasing. The end result is a not-so-hard blade, and will not able to hold edge - or in this case hard tip on keris blade

on other case, it is interesting that the person behind keris revival is indeed chinese descendant !! this is new to me ... I heard Panembahan Harjonegoro before, but never thought he was Chinese descendant :D

lastly, about museum in Solo ...
Solo's major recently elected as Jakarta's Governor ... so we can expect some change ... I hope the museum is not just an idea written on the paper ... as they already planned the location - behind Sriwedari Stadium ...

If it is indeed built, I hope to see you there :D

Donny, the core of the blade is put in place after the pamor has been made:- look at a keris blade, its a laminated blade, the pamor on the outside of a steel core. All the folding and welding is intended to remove carbon and any other impurities from the material, but the steel core is only welded once, when it is placed between the layers of pamor. The Brojoguno trick is no trick at all, really. If you make the point substantial, with a decent cross section, and it is properly hardened, any pointed tool will do the coin piercing trick. What makes it impressive is that most old keris in Jawa have lost their original form, they have been so eaten by time excessive cleaning that all the hardness and most of the substance has gone from the blade. If you see a 16th or 17th century keris that is still in original condition you will see a very strong, robust powerful blade that would easily pierce light metal.

If you give a smith decent material, and he has even a little bit of understanding of heat treatment, it is no trick at all for him to produce a pointed blade that will pierce light metal. In pre-industrial societies smiths were looked upon as magicians. In Jawa they were associated with the concept of death and rebirth, they could handle fire and iron and commune with the unseen forces. Even today a lot of technologically challenged people in Jawa regard smiths as people who can work some sort of magic. In fact, there is no magic involved in any of this, its plain common sense + a little bit knowledge + a lot of skill.

Yes, Panembahan Harjonegoro was the prime shaker and mover in the keris revival, he was actually the man behind a lot of other, possibly better known men. His family came from near Boyolali, they were wealthy, powerful people, he went to school with Pakubuwana XII and they were lifelong friends. He was very well connected in upper level Indonesian society, Bung Karno was his personal friend and actually designed part of his house in Jln. Kratonan in Solo. He himself was very wealthy, and his factory produced probably the highest quality batik in Indonesia. The Karaton Surakarta benefited greatly from his benevolence.

Joko was an absolutely great leader of Solo. I doubt if anybody would ever say a bad word of him. How many Lord Mayors drive crappy old cars that wouldn't be out of place on a scrap heap? I personally am sorry to see him go from Solo, but Jakarta is a problem, and if anybody can help fix that problem just a little bit it is Joko Widodo (Jokowi). So yes, Solo leadership has changed, but I would have greater confidence in seeing a keris museum at Sriwedari if the undertaking had been given by Joko.

However, having said that, I'd also like to put on record that I personally do not support the idea of keris museums and in fact any public exhibition of keris. Those who engage in this folly are acting contrary to the spirit that should be enshrined in this Javanese icon. Once you put a keris on public exhibition what you have achieved is to empty it. It is no longer a keris, just a piece of metal.

yeah ... you got me on this ... I forgot to remind myself that most of the old blade I've handled is already lost their original "meat" due to centuries of cleaning ...

I have a keris bali that seems so robust and strong, and I believe will have no problem in piercing coins ... but it will be a stupid idea to do that

but not yet answering my question ... about how to prevent decarburization during folding & forging process

but once more, if this is a trade secret, feel free not to answer ... really appreciate that :D

I really revere your knowledge and understanding of javanese keris as whole (not just as weapon). Comments above will only be written by someone really deeply immersed in the world of tosan aji :D

I am agree with you - it is true that once displayed in museum it becomes nothing else but a display piece - nothing more ...

but since most of Indonesian did not care about this precious heritage, and some starting to think that keris is associated with evil, and must be destroyed along with growth of radicalism in Indonesia - not to mention that experts like you are getting rarer and rarer ...

If it is needed to save the keris for now, I will settle for the museum :D
and I do hope that people like you, who had thorough understanding may share something so it will not be lost

and Jokowi already given his approval on the plan ... so I really hope to see you there someday :D

in almost the same spirit, I will never also displayed my keris, my own pusaka to anyone as I consider it personal and have deeper meaning rather than mere weapon. What I shared so far is just "rencekan" compared to the very few I owned and I am afraid I will never share it except to my descendant someday :D