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Old 20th August 2017, 05:35 PM   #27
David
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Join Date: Aug 2006
Location: Nova Scotia
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Quote:
Originally Posted by estcrh
Take a look at the karud daggers and pesh-kabz daggers below, does anyone seriously think they are the same weapons and should all be described by the same name?
Well gentlemen, i have no horse in this race. These blades are well out of my collecting area, though i do find them both beautiful and exquisitely crafted. Admittedly i know very little about them, but i do have some observations based upon my own area of interest.
In the keris world we are constantly inundated with terms for everything from various parts of the blade and elements of the hilts and sheaths to precise dhapur (profile and feature shapes) and pamor patterns. I don't know if i have ever encountered a study so seemingly obsessed with the name game. These terms can not only vary from island to island, but sometimes even from village to village and certainly from era to era. We also know that over the centuries we can also find other names used to describe the entire keris that go well beyond the divergent spellings of that word itself (i.e. kris, creese, etc.). I won't get into them here. However, the vast majority of the keris collecting world seems to have decided upon "keris" (though some, especially in the West, hold on to he spelling as "kris") to describe this asymmetrical blade that seems to have an almost infinite amount of subtle variations.
To my untrained eye i see many of the same feature elements in what you call a pesh-kabz and a karud with the major difference being only a straight blade vs. a recurved one.
Estcrh asks "does anyone seriously think they are the same weapons and should all be described by the same name?"
All i can say is that a keris is a keris whether it is a lurus (straight) blade or a wavy (luk) blade. If the only thing that hold one back from referring to a straight pesh-kabz as such is the straightens of the blade i don't really find that to be much of a problem.
The keris examples i show below are the least of the variations one can find in keris blades from various parts of the area. Yet they are all called "keris".
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