[Jim McDougall]

This is a truly interesting topic, as clearly evidenced by the over 2100 views in just 4 days on this thread. While what you note is important, that weapons are acquired and researched, often the key material is lost as the weapon changes hands and becomes disassociated. I think it is important for collectors to number, photograph and catalog their items to perpetuate the data and research completed for further progress as required or to substantiate its history.

Regarding the outstanding paper written on the sword purported to have belonged to Tipu, if I might offer an analogy with similar case.

It concerns the sword of Myles Standish (1584-1656), one of the key figures in establishing the colonies in America.

In later years, colonial historians sought to embellish the lore and stories about their history, and presented several items attributed to Standish. The one we are concerned with is a sword of hanger form said to have belonged to him, and with a long, colorful history.

In the New York Times (June 15,1881) an article about Standish, they claimed his sword, now being displayed at a museum, was used in his combat experience fighting Ottomans in Austria, later taken to campaign in Flanders.
It was proclaimed that a Professor James Rosenthal had described mysterious Arabic writing and devices on the blade to be in ancient Kufic, an Arabic script and that the blade dated to hundreds of years before Christ.
It was continued in another version that the sword was given to him by a grateful old armorer in Flanders whom he had saved (Standish was a mercenary fighting for British allied with Dutch in Anglo-Spanish war of 1685-1604).
It is believed that he remained there, where he later made contact with the Puritans.

The problem with this sword, which complies with the Tipu sword example,
is this is clearly a hanger of 18th century, likely with German blade. In the 18th century, these kinds of hangers used as 'hirshfangers' (hunting swords) often carried cosmological devices and symbols intended talismanically or to bring good fortune.

The Arabic devices on the blade are known as 'bedough' and resemble magic squares found in European instance having amuletic values. It is highly unusual to see these Arabic examples, however certainly possible.

The STORY of this sword of Myles Standish was perpetuated once again in the "Virginia Chronicle" Recorder #2, 14 Jan. 1921:
claiming the blade was Damascus, made in Persia, and it had been acquired (presumably from the old armorer in Flanders) who got it from an ancestor in the Crusades.

Obviously all this hyperbole is entirely apocryphal, and intended to heighten the profound character of Standish's sword, as if carrying it to the stature of "Excalibur" with King Arthur (that is another story!).

Research reveals the powerful poetry of America's poet laureate, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who in "The Courtship of Myles Standish" in 1858, included ..." his trusty sword of Damascus, curved at the point and inscribed with its mystical Arabic sentence".

So here was likely the source for this obviously inflated character of the Myles Standish sword. Did Longfellow draw his description from already circulating stories? or interpolate terms to embellish his words?

We know Longfellow often did this, as in the case of his poem "the Wreck of the Hesperus", decribing a catastrophic hurricane in New England in 1839 . In this he described a schooner dashed on the reef of Normans Woe near Cape Cod and the tragic details of the captains daughter lashed to a mast, who was lost just the same.
However while the event did occur, it was an older woman, and the ships name apparently did not ring bells....so Longfellow borrowed the name of another schooner which was damaged in Boston....the HESPERUS, which had a more impacting name with classical character to heighten the impact of the disaster.

With the Standish sword, it is seen in a photo from c. 1870, and these other illustrations (uncited). As far as I know, the swords whereabouts are unknown today.
What puzzles me is, how could people who must have been familiar with hangers like this from the previous century and even similar in their times, have been gullible enough to accept this sword as ancient etc.

This is why arms research is so important, and not only to learn history from the arms themselves, but to secure and preserve it for future generations.