Hello,
I recently won this lot of old shibriyas on an auction. I bought them mainly for the smallest one which is a neat little dagger of a known type shown in previous threads.
The other two are also early and nice enough, but are not in a very good shape and show multiple repairs. Some pieces are missing too and the middle one has a silver covered Palestinian sheath which is a replacement-the dagger itself is Jordanian. This latter type has also been discussed in a recent thread (
http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showth...light=Shibriya).
But there was a little bonus too. I hypothesized in this forum that the shibriyas only developed around WWI and the early types, such as the ones below (from a collection of a friend) are from the late 1920' and 1930'. This assumption was based on 2-3 old pictures.
When I cleaned the the largest one, I found a date on the side of the hilt.
I have never seen a shibriya dated to before 1940. This inscription was probably written by an illiterate man as the digit 3 is written backwards, but it can only be interpreted as 1352-1933 in Gregorian calender. So I finally found solid support for my assumption.