[Jim McDougall]

Originally Posted by ariel

I used to dream about a book of Persian arms and armor by Elgood.

But then I understood that it was a fruitless fantasy: Elgood is an ethnologist and an art historian deep in his heart. He thrives in multiethnic, multicultural, multireligious scenery with multiple variants of weapons, structural and artistic changes every 100 miles and every 50 years. Give him a pile of sabers with different handles, swords with blades of dazzling complexity, handles with convoluted religious motives and he will write a 500-page superb book that would read like old John Le Carre.

Persian weapons are beautiful, superbly crafted, but their patterns are terminally uniform and rigid: they achieved what they thought was "perfection" and stayed there. Compare an inexhaustible variety of Indian bladed weapons with the Persian panoply, consisting of shamshir, pesh kabz, khanjar and kard. That's it.

What could Elgood write about them? Twenty pages max.......

But what a twenty six pages it would be!!!!!!