Really old Indian scabbards must be rarer than hen's teeth: dry heat, wet heat, rains....
Anything from early 19th century in good condition would be a unique example, except for something stored in a royal palace and attended to on a regular basis.
I remember reading somewhere that the Russian War Ministry specified scabbards replacement for cossack hosts ( they were made of wood/leather) every 3 years or something similar. Every time a sword was taken out or put into the scabbard, it cut the wooden inserts and the leather, the leather dried out ( Jens' example) or just rotted.
The reason we see those gorgeous scabbards in Wallace Collection is because they were made largely post 1870 in royal workshops and immediately sold as souvenirs to European museums, dealers and just for the general public to hang them on the wall in their British libraries next to Victorian copies of " medieval" swords..
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