Quote:
Originally Posted by ariel
Sorry to sound “eurocentric”, but without European tradition of museum maintenance we would still be in the total darkness. We know infinitely more about old European weapons than the Oriental ones because of meticulous written records in private collections and multiple museums as well as from a multitude of books , Oakeshott being just one example.
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Description of museum collections and the museum work in whole is only a small part of the science of weapons.
You are right, there was confusion with the terminology of Indian weapons and this was historically determined. But that's in the past. The problem is that this continues even now and is exacerbated by the appearance of non-scientific glossaries built randomly.
The fact is, and this is also due to historical reasons, that the study of weapons folded as a description of collections and it was (and is) not a science, but a service and an entertainment for collectors and dealers. The purpose of science is the search for truth. The goal of the dealer is to sell you as much as possible. This requires colorful descriptions and a lot of different muddy information. It warms up the market. That is why a lot of colorful albums were published instead of academic research.
The next problem is that the weapons were studied by art historians instead of real historians . Any mafia in the field of any art consists of a band of a collector, a dealer and an art historian. As a result of such “research”, we can see the appearance of strange objects at auctions, and then on the basis of these chimeras, after their legitimizing, we can see the appearance of entire groups of similar items.
Until the study of weapons is built on the principles of scientific research, we will forever be discussing here strange items from the next auction, or why in the next colorful album the same items are called differently, and different items are called by the same names.