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Old 17th December 2005, 03:17 PM   #3
nechesh
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Join Date: Dec 2004
Location: Cincinnati, OH
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Well, the repro is a little rough on some of these images, but they all appear to be beautiful hilts. I might have to get the Jensen book and brush up on my Dutch. It looks fairly obvious that that lovely Shiva hilt doesn't belong on that first keris, doesn't it?
Anyway, i think you might be right, that the original terminology for these hilts may well have been lost. To me the last of them looks like it could be a stylized raksasa, but i wouldn't bet the farm on the other two. The first of them (the abstract hilts) almost looks more like a hanuman to me. I would not be at all surprised if more than one type of figurative form was cloaked in this type of vegetal abstraction. Wish we had better images.
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