These are really interesting Teodor, , and while I cannot add anything I just wanted to note I never had any idea that the Sudanese used command batons.
I think that most of my focus has been on Mahdist and post Omdurman forces and weaponry, and by this time other means of identifying leaders of the varying units were used.
I could understand specified Sudanese association with these captured in Ottoman action against Greece in that early time as Ottoman Egypt had nominally taken Sudan in 1821, and they surely used Sudanese forces in degree. What is confusing is the title of this paper (which I have not been able to access yet) suggests the use of the sphero-conical items in 19th c Sudan but it is unclear how they were used.
Here attached to these mysterious batons is puzzling as it would seem there is some symbolic convention intended (the use of these as grenades etc. in ancient to Mamluk period contexts) much in the way a gorget is intended as a badge of rank or distinction.
I look forward to getting this article as the only article I have accessed by this author pretty much asks similar questions but no answers.
It would seem that Ottomans might have adopted the baton use as noted as they adopted many European military notions, which in turn were in many cases from traditions into antiquity, but these are most curious.
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