[Jim McDougall]

Hi Matt,
You have, in borrowing a well used phrase, 'awakened a sleeping giant', as the conundrum of so many markings and devices on arms of the subcontinent remains unsolved. We can of course speculate with some reasonable accuracy on many, such as the 'sickle' and these 'twig' type marks and a few others
This marking on the tulwar you show is in much the same blade quadrant as many stamped cartouches on these North Indian examples. If I recall, these are often a squared cartouche enclosing typically Urdu characters. Since these are often in the same location adjacent to the langet near the ricasso it may be of course some type of arsenal or acceptance stamp. In a similar instance an Algerian 'nimcha' (Briggs, 1965) illustrates a round cartouche with Arabic characters in similar location near blade edge, and that is presumed again some sort of acceptance or approval mark.

Another possibility is that marks in these locations on Islamic blades may have some sort of talismanic purpose, such as with the well known ' beduh' squares with numeric symbolism. In any case, the mark on your example here is virtually indiscernible, but seems to have the remains of serrated edge. The only European marks similar are the dentated half arcs of the 'sickles' but as far as I know these were never applied in this blade location. By the same token, the pierced langet seen here is typically on the tulwars farther north, particularly Sind, in that case Talpur, but again speculation. Afghan paluoars almost typically have spurious sickle marks on the blade at the near center of the blades length as seen on yours, but whether this curious mark near the blade root is related remains unclear.

Whatever the case it would be interesting to get a better image of the mark, whether in better light or even a sketch delineating the key points of the device. Every marking has the potential of being either a prototype or important anomaly.

All the best,
Jim