Gentlemen,
I really appreciate your responses and the excellent examples you have added to this thread. I should have looked in Panga Na Visu myself, not sure why I forgot to do that before posting here.
Abdul Hamid II ruled from 1876 to 1908, so the spear/scepter bearing coins from the time of his rule is almost certainly from the time of the Mahdist state. These obviously are not useful as weapons, and their use must have been entirely ceremonial - that is for certain. The question remains - what was that ceremonial application in a military context? Were these used as dancing spears prior to battles, in rituals intended to raise religious fever and troop morale? Or were they possibly also used on the battlefield by officers as marks of rank? I personally do not have an answer.
I will just take a moment to briefly examine the provenance of the example in Pradines' paper, as it is dated to the 1820s. Supposedly a couple of those batons can be seen in a photograph from the 1890s hanging in the house of Athansios Lidorikis, a prominent participant in the Greek War of Liberation, alogn with some other trophies from the war. I cannot find the exact dates during which Lidorikis lived, but he is quite old on a portrait painted in 1855, so we can assume that he was not around during the Mahdist wars. Based on this, it seems likely that the dating Pradines provides - 1820s, is correct. This would mean that at least two such batons were carried with the Egyptian troops all the way to Greece, and that these items date at least to the early 19th century, predating their use by Mahdist forces.
Based on all this, the dancing spear attribution seems very plausible, and these may be tied to pre-Islam shamanistic rituals. I am not sure if there is a dancing spear/mace significance in Sufism.
On the other hand, there are other items used by Mahdist forces with more of a symbolic nature, such as thuluth inscribed throwing knives, thuluth inscribed spear shaped battle standards (or are they battle standards?) with short hilts, etc. These items tend to be a piece of sheet steel, with etchings and no real edge and practically useless in battle, but were carried for whatever reason - possibly due to their purported spiritual powers, or as military rank insignia. The two uses are actually not necessarily mutually exclusive. Or they may have been carried by religious figures who were there to boost morale and were not meant to ever find themselves in actual combat situations, though carrying a baton does not preclude one from also carrying a sword.
Again, thank you for the responses, as I am learning a lot from this thread.
Teodor
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