Ethnographic Arms & Armour - View Single Post - Looking for info on this carved bone kris

jagabuwana · 21st October 2022, 01:03 AM

The inscription has what appear to be harakat diacritics which are only used in Qur'anic Arabic. I'm thrown as to what it's supposed to say though. It's less to do with the legibility and more to do with it making little sense.
It could be the first part of the shahada, split across both faces of the blade but if it is it's been written as if it's by someone who has no a low command of how to use Qur'anic Arabic script and who doesn't know how to spell, so attempts to spell purely phonetically.

If we transliterate the first half of the shahada it would be "ashhadu an laa ilaaha illAllahu", but what we have here might be something more like
Face 1: "alshaa haduu Allah [..]"
Face 2: "[..] Aa Allaha IllAllah" - then followed by a letter or two that I can't make out.

21st October 2022, 01:03 AM	#5
jagabuwana Member Join Date: Jan 2018 Location: Sydney, Australia Posts: 276	The inscription has what appear to be harakat diacritics which are only used in Qur'anic Arabic. I'm thrown as to what it's supposed to say though. It's less to do with the legibility and more to do with it making little sense. It could be the first part of the shahada, split across both faces of the blade but if it is it's been written as if it's by someone who has no a low command of how to use Qur'anic Arabic script and who doesn't know how to spell, so attempts to spell purely phonetically. If we transliterate the first half of the shahada it would be "ashhadu an laa ilaaha illAllahu", but what we have here might be something more like Face 1: "alshaa haduu Allah [..]" Face 2: "[..] Aa Allaha IllAllah" - then followed by a letter or two that I can't make out. Last edited by jagabuwana; 21st October 2022 at 01:05 AM. Reason: removed a tautology