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Originally Posted by ariel
Most of the swordmakers in Georgia/Southern Russia and "Daghestan" area in the second half of the 19th century were ethnic Armenians. Many Turkish swords with "Latin" inscriptions (usually, military patterns of 19th cen) also often carry Armenian names. Armenians were THE artisans of the Ottoman Asia Minor and the Caucasus (I guess, Persia as well.....)
There are very few examples of truly Armenian weaponry, and one needs to be very cautious in assigning a particular sword to the "Armenian" group. The only acceptable evidence is Armenian lettering. Even Armenian name per se may not be enough: Geurk Purunsuzov worked in Akhaltsikhe (Georgia), created truly astonishing Georgian swords, kindjals and shashkas and signed them mostly in Russian. Was he an Armenian master? Ethnically yes, culturally no.
Thus, Tirri's example is Armenian (although I fail to appreciate it's importance...), but this one.. Who knows?
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I could not disagree more. In Dagestan proper most of production was traditionally done in a few villages (Amazgi - blades, Kubachi - niello, Kazi-Kumuh, Kazanishe etc.), with absolutely zero presence of armenians. Concerning the trans-Caucasus: Astvatsaturjan on p. 387 cites that among Tiflis weaponsmiths 80 were armenians, 9 local muslims, 8
laks. etc. However ! 3 lines below she noticed "it looks like muslims were dominant among the blade makers". A little bit below she specifically mentions the importance of lezgi as weapon makers.
The confusion is due to the fact that 80 armenians while obviously comprising the majority of artisans in Tiflis, were mostly involved not in sword or blade production per se, but either in making guns, gun parts repairs or in making jewelry with scabbards/belts and similar sword-related items being their secondary source of income. Second confusion comes from the fact that all of the information in Astvatsaturjan's book comes from big city registrations (guilds or hallmark's registry). In 1795 Tiflis was burned to the ground by iranian forces and repopulated by armenians - partially because of their loyalty to iranians and later russians, partially due to the large influx of refugees from Ottoman territories. The city was almost entirely armenian until XXth century. Baku and Erivan were also heavily populated by armenians, as well as Ottoman cities like Kars, Van etc. Therefore the information given on p.404 is somewhat misleading first of all nearly all given information if for large, armenian-populated cities, with an exception of Zugdidi,Kutaisi (georgian populated) and Lagich (jewish). A few villages that are mentioned - Ahalkalaki/Ahalzih for example, were swarmed with armenian refugees who comprised roughly 70% of the local population. With an exception of this, there is no information on smaller production in the villages and on unregistered artisans (mostly muslims, since in many cities only christians formed guilds). While in the text we can find that making swords was extremely popular in Laz/Trabzon/Batum areas, there is not a single Laz/Ajar city in the table.
Second, it does not say what exactly were the weapons produced by these "weaponsmiths" - as I quoted above there was a big difference between gunsmiths and blademakers' communities. If these two factors would have been corrected, we would probably have a much better representation of who was doing what.
Concerning Iran proper most of armenians were concentrated in New-Julfa city, while sword making was spread out throughout the country - Shiraz, later Tehran etc. This alone, together with extreme rarity of armenian-signed weapons (the first one I've seen so far is a Qajar revival sword in this forum) probably speaks to that armenian involvement was far from dominant (or even significant) outside of armenian populated ares of southern Caucasus and a few cities like Lvov.
Another thing is that while you see here and there references in Iranian books towards "mails from Kubachi" or "indian swords" you never see someone swinging an "armenian mace".