Ethnographic Arms & Armour - View Single Post

A. G. Maisey · 18th July 2018, 10:24 PM

No Kai, we did not cross posts, I read your post before I wrote.

You can call this beladau or jambiyo blade whatever you wish, I think you know my opinions in respect of playing with names --- the people who are mostly responsible for the names used by collectors of ethnic objects and who have come from outside the societies responsible for the origin of these objects, as far as I can see do not and have not understood the languages involved, nor the societies of the people involved. This is a generality and can without doubt be shown to be incorrect in some instances.

So --- name it as you will.

The two names I have given I have not taken from any book, I have not heard them from another collector, I have not pulled them out of thin air, nor dreamt them up after finishing a bottle of shiraz.

Beladau was given to me first by a dealer who lived in Jogja, but came from Palembang, that was around 1980. In later years I had the same name given to me again by several people who were not collectors or dealers of weapons or artefacts, just ordinary people, housewives and their husbands. These people were from various places in Sumatra, and I seem to recall one couple came from somewhere else, maybe Malaysia.

Jambiyo is the general name for any dagger with curved double edge blade and a hilt with flared pommel and ferrule section, like the Middle Eastern jambiya.

In both cases the people I knew who used the name beladau/jambiyo did not draw any distinction between short, broad, deeply curved blades and longer narrower, irregularly curved blades, but the daggers that they saw in my possession did have the same type of hilt, something like a crude version of a ME jambiya.

So for me, Rafngard's cobbled up dagger has the blade of a beladau.

What anybody else may care to call it is up to them.

An after-thought:-

I do not know, but I suspect that "beladau" might be a generic used to refer to a class of daggers.
Reason being that "bela" means "defence", "dau" is possibly a corruption of "daun" = "leaf", the word "leaf" is sometimes used as an indirect reference to a blade.

18th July 2018, 10:24 PM	#7
A. G. Maisey Member Join Date: May 2006 Posts: 6,698	No Kai, we did not cross posts, I read your post before I wrote. You can call this beladau or jambiyo blade whatever you wish, I think you know my opinions in respect of playing with names --- the people who are mostly responsible for the names used by collectors of ethnic objects and who have come from outside the societies responsible for the origin of these objects, as far as I can see do not and have not understood the languages involved, nor the societies of the people involved. This is a generality and can without doubt be shown to be incorrect in some instances. So --- name it as you will. The two names I have given I have not taken from any book, I have not heard them from another collector, I have not pulled them out of thin air, nor dreamt them up after finishing a bottle of shiraz. Beladau was given to me first by a dealer who lived in Jogja, but came from Palembang, that was around 1980. In later years I had the same name given to me again by several people who were not collectors or dealers of weapons or artefacts, just ordinary people, housewives and their husbands. These people were from various places in Sumatra, and I seem to recall one couple came from somewhere else, maybe Malaysia. Jambiyo is the general name for any dagger with curved double edge blade and a hilt with flared pommel and ferrule section, like the Middle Eastern jambiya. In both cases the people I knew who used the name beladau/jambiyo did not draw any distinction between short, broad, deeply curved blades and longer narrower, irregularly curved blades, but the daggers that they saw in my possession did have the same type of hilt, something like a crude version of a ME jambiya. So for me, Rafngard's cobbled up dagger has the blade of a beladau. What anybody else may care to call it is up to them. An after-thought:- I do not know, but I suspect that "beladau" might be a generic used to refer to a class of daggers. Reason being that "bela" means "defence", "dau" is possibly a corruption of "daun" = "leaf", the word "leaf" is sometimes used as an indirect reference to a blade. Last edited by A. G. Maisey; 18th July 2018 at 11:12 PM.