[Gustav]

While reeding van Duuren's booklet I was stunned how thin in fact the story of Charles Knaud's brothers grandson (who "was familiar with direct descendants existence, but not personally acquainted with them") is - not better and not worse then contemporary keris-selling-stories in Indonesia.

There surely are many questions about this object, because almost every physical part of it is a question. I would like to adress a small, seemingly unimportant feature.

On the Sogokan side of the bronze plaque there is depicted a carriage, drawn by two horses (?) and a single rider on a horse. My problem with this depiction is a following one: until now I don't know of any similar representation of carriages wheels in such spatial way in East-Javanese period art.

The same I can say about the representation of the dynamic motion of the horse with rider - I don't know the proper name of this motion, let's call it a leaping horse. It is something we can find in Middle-East/Indian/European art, perhaps in later Javanese manuscript illuminations or Wayang, but until now I haven't seen anything comparable from East Javanese period.

Also exactly the same spatial rendering of wheels of carriage (and the animals which are drawing it) can be find on Wayang Kulit figures, which date back to 19th century.

I also would like to address a section in van Duuren's conclusion I have a problem with. It defends authenticity of the object and he writes:

"Moreover, do so at a time when Javanese antiquities were only of value to a small number of ethnological museums and an extremely small circle of experts. After all, a commercial market for collectors, antique dealers and auctions where many Asian antiquities are handled - and where an Indo-Javanese keris presented as genuine would not attract a high price if nobody had realized it was a fake - did not exist."

In the collection of Raffles there are 132 metal figurines. Most of them are from Middle-/East-Javanese period, but over 20 are datable of end of 1700ties/beginning of 1800ties. They are very crude forgeries of art from earlier periods, collected in 1811-1816. That means that already at that time Javanese must have seen here a possibility of profit and started to make these again after a gap of about 300 years. How much more advanced the "art" could have been in 1880ties! Let's remember - the Knaud's keris entered the reality as a submission to "Exhibition of Products of Some Brances of Industry and Art", was given the second prize, and apparently was part of a collection, which "has never been described anywhere", not the best provenance we can think of.

I think, there is a quite high percent of possibility the Knaud's Keris is a hoax, and this percent did not become smaller with me after reading the booklet. On the other side, I must accept, that I actually know almost nothing. I would like to make an illustration of that feeling with another keris, the state heirloom of Kutai Kartanagara. The tradition says, it comes from time of Majapahit, it is depicted as drawing in Schmeltz's article from 1890. Regrettably this is the only photograph of it I could find - enjoy!