Tiv sounds right
Tim and Freddy ,
Tiv (or Tiv related) sounds plausable to me. They would have ready access to shark and rayskin from the Atlantic. I should have picked up on the leaf shaped/center rib similarities between the Tiv loop dagger blade and my wife's blade. Thanks for pointing it out.
Louieblades,
Thanks for the link to the thread. Your hilt and my wife's are very similar. I was watching your hilt appear on the screen and thinking gee haw, we've got a match and then the blade and sheath came up and it was dang, we have a puzzle. It seems with African pieces especially that you'll get a match with one or two of the three main components (hilt, sheath, blade) but one or two of the components so frequently don't match. Your blade with its flattened diamond cross section and my wife's one sided raised rib design are a perfect case in point. Furthermore, yours appears to be an arm dagger whereas the loop on Barb's sheath appears to be designed for belt carry. Both daggers are rather small for African pieces and I wonder if the that small size doesn't indicate that they were meant for women (although I don't know if women wore arm daggers). If they didn't, that shoots that theory down.
Sincerely,
RobT
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