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Originally Posted by thinreadline
Thanks Iain .. oh well 30 years of delusion ! This means yet another rearrangement of my walls .. wish I had known about this forum years ago !
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I wish you had too Richmond!!! You've been a valuable addition here and your posting of so many intriguing weapons has been beneficial to us with the prompting to revisiting previous discussions on them as here.
As seen in the linked discussion from 2008, these actually were generally held by collectors to have been from Zanzibar as referenced in Demmin (1877) then by Burton (1884) as these were seen by Burton in his visits there in 1857. I am unsure whether Demmin copied the attribution from Burton whose work on Zanzibar was not published until 1872, or if it was the other way around. Burtons references and line drawings in any case are identical to Demmins, but I have handled Burton's original manuscripts in pencil, which I believe included these sketches.
Whatever the case, the attribution was simply presumed as these weapons were visually seen in Zanzibar by him, and probably copied by Demmin in compiling his work.
In the book on Charles Buttin's collections published posthumously in Rummilly , France in 1933, the misattribution is noted, and the correct identification as the Moroccan s'boula is established. This is emphasized by the fact that Charles Buttin and his sons had varying residence in Morocco over many years and very well knew their weapons. It should be noted that many of these are in scabbards with baldric type carry rings, which are similar in configuration to koummya.
Richmond, the Abyssinian presumption is actually somewhat established by the diffusion of these weapons via trade entrepot in trans Saharan routes into those regions as well as Zanzibar. In a relatively obscure booklet titled 'The Weapons of Africa' by Lindert (cannot recall exact date) one of these is shown, and there are extant examples known with Amharic insciption on blade.
By original provenance however, the type appears to be Moroccan.
All the best,
Jim