Well, I'm obviously in a minority of one here. What can I say, it's a gut thing?
Certainly, from having read Elgood myself (though not much else), I would have thought it were luxury trade blades, say wootz inlaid with gold calligraphy, swooping across stylistic boundaries for the handles rather than objectively mediocre provincial work.
While I'm not qualified to assess the blades, the calligraphy on, say, the lower three blades seems, to me, identical. That is, the differences between them are attributible to failure of execution rather than variety of intention. While not an Arabic speaker, from the comments kindly placed on the relevant threads, the inscriptions seem unusually anomalous- illegible, or outside the usual tenor or style. In a distinctly unscientific way, when I look at them, I feel the way I do when I handle Derra-made jezails...
Through the half-remembered ghost of anthropological semi-expertise, I'd have said that a long-running traditional style of decoration would be well-represented in published, well provenanced or pre-20th century collections.
I'm a novice, and utterly prepared to accept that my hunch is wrong. That said, I'd be genuinely keen to see any well-provenanced examples of the above decoration any other collectors here might possess, if only for reassurance. I'm thinking of selling the yat and want to do it in good conscience.
Rumpel.
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