Hello, I want to share these daggers from my collection because they are probably unfamiliar to most of you. In addition, if any of you have a similar one, I kindly ask you to share it with me and others.
They are very simple village-type daggers made for ordinary people. Artzi helped me to identify the first one and they are known to local collectors as Lebanese daggers. While this might be true, I suspect that most of them originate from within the borders of the British Mandate in Palestine for two reasons. First, the decoration on the scabbard of the lower 3 shows a pattern that is charateristic for Palestine and similar to shibriyas made there (see pic 3). Second, they all come from England and Australia, and 2 were sold as brought-back souveniers of British soldiers serving in the Middle East. Therefore, it is likely that they were bought in Palestine (not Lebanon) during GB presence there (1917-1947). The main reason I like them is personal. They come from the Upper Gallilea, near the Lebanese border, like me, but in another life.
Besides shibriyas, they also show resemblance to some other Southern Syrian/Palestinian daggers (pic 4). They have been mentioned in this forum before in a discussion of Lebanese daggers of Jezzine type, which are more presentation daggers than actually ethnographic items (see
http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showth...ebanese+dagger). Thanks for watching.