Hi, Ariel
Thanks for sharing this link. Quite a few of these are hitting the market as of late, I hear "on the street" that many are being excavated in and exported from Hungary. Those are attributed to the Avars, a nomadic warrior people of Asiatic origin who invaded Eastern Europe around the 9th cent. AD.
Although we have heard a lot of "bad news" from our colleagues in the European medieval sword field about the plethora of fakes coming out of Eastern Europe, I have examined a number of these Eurasian sabers (including the one in the Met) and am generally confident that most are indeeed "kosher" . For one thing, these blades to date have been a rather esoteric collecting field with limited appeal (as opposed to the long-standing immense interest in the swords of Western Europe's chivalric age), there has been little financial incentive to fake them.
Last summer I bought one from Czerny's (it was an unsold lot). Blade very similar to the longer one in the eBay sale, with the iron scabbard chape attached. I removed the chape, and found the blade to be in surprisingly good condition in most parts (other areas predictably corroded), with surfaces and contours in far better condition than the eBay specimens.
What interested me was the sleeve or "tunkou" at the forte (almost identical to later Chinese examples), and the prominent ridges or "shinogi" on both sides. I polished a portion of the blade and found it to be quite a decent example of lamellar construction. Gently flexing the blade reveals that it is quite resilient, and it rings clearly when struck (most reassuring to know that it isn't a hammered-down piece of wrought-iron fence post
)