Sudanese Command Batons
Here is a somewhat unusual item - based on a paper by Stephane Pradnies from 2016, titled "A Late Military Use of the Sphero-conical in the 19th Century Sudan", I believe it to be two Sudanese command batons from the 19th century. You can find the paper in Academia.edu, and these look very similar to the item shown in Fig. 2. According to Pradnies , the small baton has provenance as a trophy, collected following the battle of Navarino in 1827 when the Egyptian fleet was destroyed during the war that led to the independence of Greece from the Ottoman Empire. The collection of various trophies with Eastern African origin from the Egyptian Corps that were fighting on the Ottoman side as Ottoman vassals would perhaps also explain the gile in Elgood's book.
Per Pradines, there were two such batons collected, one of which is in a private collection in the UK, and another one in a private collection in Greece. They consisted of short woodens shafts, with a small spearhead in one end and a sphero-conical vessel in the other. Unfortunately, one of mine has lost the sphero-conical vessel, and at some point it looks like someone tried to combine the two into one with some brass wire. The use of these sphero-conical vessels is also a point of debate, but their mostly likely use was as standardized containers used during the Indian Ocean trade dating back to the time of the Mamelukes in the late Middle Ages.
Again, all of this info is based on Pradines' paper. Have you seen similar items? These tend to appear as pairs, as opposed to single items, and I also wonder what the significance of that would be.
Teodor
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