Thread: Nomadic swords
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Old 27th October 2018, 02:42 AM   #34
Philip
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ariel
One potential explanation for the ascendance ( not the appearance) of the " inverted tunkou" may be purely artistic.


At some stage of the game ( my guess 14-15 century), in the Islamic areal tunkou lost its engineering meaning and became purely decorative. Inscriptions on the blade became popular. Stamps and cartouches were far too small to accomodate a dedication, a prayer or even a motto. Necessarily, they had to be oriented longitudinally. Also, they had to utilize a " less-working" part of the blade, the lower quarter or so, adjacent to the handle/ handguard. On top of that, placing them along the edge would mean an inevitable loss of the sacral inscription as a result of repeat sharpening. The solution was simple: place them along the spine. And here, cutlers could combine the above practical points with the existing fashion of tunkou: short segment of decoration occupying the entire width of the blade adjacent to the handguard and a long inscription along the spine. A quick example is shown.

This was a homage to the traditional tunkou, that utilized the " upside down" pattern. From that point on the majority of single-edged Islamic blades were decorated in that manner and the "classical" tunkou simply vanished.

Of course, this does not explain the initial appearance of the inverted tunkou, but perhaps it explains the later popularity of it.

Just a thought...
Ariel, your train of thought is quite plausible, it makes perfect sense in light of the aesthetic requirement of making room for long inscriptions. But when I look at the image, I think of something else. The long panel at the spine is not really joined to the element at the base of the blade. Well, they may be touching at a corner of each element, but if we were trying to look at this as a subsequent adaptation of the "traditional" tunkou shape (i.e. in its original, functional guise), the theory loses some steam because an actual tunkou would have to be of unitary construction in order to serve its purpose. The confluence of shapes defined by the inscription panels on the shamshir blade does not seem to be a realistic carry-over from an actual fabrication made of metal sheet and attached via a friction fit around the base of the blade.

Rather, what I see on this Persian example is the traditional tunkou outline (with tongue extending forward on the edge side) SUPPLEMENTED BY an elongated panel ahead of it, along the spine, serving as a border for the extended inscription. You could even think of the space for the dorsal inscription as the visual equivalent of those chiseled elongated panels containing animals that you see on the Seljuk blade whose image I posted on this thread previously. Just that in the case of your shamshir, the two areas are scrunched very close together with no significant empty space in between them.
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