Unusual dagger ?Philippines ?N. Africa
 

This dagger sold at auction yesterday. I won't have it for a couple of weeks as it is coming from California. The attached pictues come from the auction site.

The knife was sold as a Philippines punal from the last decade of the 19th C. I'm not convinced this is a Philippines knife, or even a Spanish colonial knife. It's an odd one, mainly for the etched "inscription" on both side of the triangular blade.

The hilt has two pieces of bone flanking a central piece of horn. The pieces are separated by steel spacers. The guard and pommel cap are steel. The pictures do not reveal if the hilt has a full length tang.The blade has repeating triplets of etched letters/symbols along its length, best seen on the flat reverse side. The sheath is black leather with metal mounts at the throat and toe.

The etched marks on the blade are especially confusing for a Phlippine knife and much more closely resemble marks on certain North African swords. I have an old kaskara from Chad with similar marks, and I seem to remember these marks have also been found on Ethiopian and Abyssian blades. I'm sure Jim McD will recall.

Perhaps this is a blade from N. Africa.
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Old kaskara with similarly etched inscription
 

Here are pictures of my old kaskara (said to be from Chad) that has similarly etched inscriptions. The blade on this sword is especially dark and I'm reluctant to clean it too much because that may damage the etched inscriptions. The inscriptions are reasonably clear with a little photoshopping to bring them out.

It certainly has that Colonial Spanish flair.I like your theory about the writing having the same look as your Kaskara; based on the script's appearance, not only does it look the same to me,but I see a taper of the letters that indicates that this was cut out of a Kaskara sword.
How this sword got to the Philippines, if indeed it did, no one knows, but in the day, good steel was a commodity, as were many U.S. files that became Philippine weapons.

When it is indeed a Philippine it would be a "tres cantos" dagger and it would be unlikely that it was made from a kaskara blade. :confused:

Regards,
Detlef

http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showth...=sudan+bayonet

screan shot so it can stay regardless of photobucket.

Thank you Tim!

I think you've nailed it convincingly. A repurposed bayonet, possibly a British Martini Enfield pattern 1876/95 Egyptian bayonet, remounted in Sudan or thereabouts and subsequently etched with these inscriptions. The British bayonet was around during the Mahdist period, so this dagger could have been made for a follower of the Mahdi.

I have to hand it to you guys and the archives developed by this Forum. There really is not a comparable public forum where I could have found this precise information within a few hours of posting such an obscure item.

Regards, Ian

The Egyptian army did not receive the Martini-Enfield until 1903, 4 years after the end of the Mahdiya. During the Mahdist Rebellion, the Mahdists captures Egyptian Remington Rolling Block rifles, with a yataghan bayonet. The British used Martini Henry rifles against the Mahdists, but I have severe doubts the Mahdists had the ability to obtain any through either trade or as trophies - it was the British who won the battles and collected trophies, rather than the other way around.

The hilt design on this very interesting dagger is entirely European in style. While there were a lot of trophies taken after battles during the Mahdist Wars, there seems to have been an even greater demand for such souvenirs than the battlefields were able to supply. In the past, we have discussed the possibility that a lot of the acid etched blade kaskaras with brass hilts may have been a product of a thriving post war industry. To me it sounds more likely that a British soldier stationed in Sudan after the suppression of the Mahdists had this knife fashioned from a Martini bayonet according to his own taste and added the etched thuluth to the blade as a memento of his service there, or maybe even of the Sudan campaign itself.

Many parts of the world was awash with guns like the brown bess so these etched bayonet converted weapons are most probably part of the Mahdist armoury. However the example in question does appear to refashioned to European taste.

TVV, Thank you for that insight into the adoption of Martini bayonets by Egypt. As you say, this may well be a memento of the Sudan Wars from the early 1900s. The etching on my knife is so similar to what appears on kaskara from the Mahdist period that I think it likely was done in Sudan by a local who was familiar with the old inscriptions.