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Old 2nd July 2011, 09:25 AM   #19
A. G. Maisey
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Join Date: May 2006
Posts: 6,704
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Koripan is really pretty basic stuff. Its the place that is best known for commercially produced blades in Central Jawa, however, I guess you don't get to hear about it unless you're Javanese, because as I said, the dealers almost invariably present these blades as Mataram.

I can't show you pictures. I might have a few Koripan blades in stock, I've got none in my collection, but to find them would involve time and work. I'm sorry. However, if you note the salient features of this blade of Michael's virtually all Koripan blades will look similar.

AND bear this in mind, I said :- "If I handled this blade, I feel that I would probably classify it as Koripan."

That's a qualification Jean. I'm 90+% sure its Koripan, but in the hand there could be indicators that pushed my opinion in a different direction.

We all know Tuban, but that's actually a tangguh, rather than designation of a specific village location. Tuban was a sea port, and blades passed through it as items of trade, both for places outside Jawa, and for the interior. The tradition is that Tuban made blades for use in the various kingdoms--- Pajajaran, Majapahit, Mataram--- but Tuban never had the industrial capacity to do this, if you read the old accounts of Tuban, it was just a muddy little sea port, however, smiths from surrounding areas would have brought their product to Tuban to sell.

There was Gresik, which is well known for copies of old historic tangguhs, like Pajajaran, Segaluh, Majapahit. Pretty easy to pick the Gresik copies because the material almost invariably has a greasy feel to it.

This is what I can think of easily. There were other places scattered all over that produced blades "in the style of", some of these are decent, some are just pretty ordinary, but only a few have been given their own widely known classifications, like Matesih ( Mataram Matesih) and Madiun.

I don't think that we can take this identication of a couple of places as identification of any source for ordinary blades. Going back a couple of hundred years or so, I believe you would have found pandai keris and skilled smiths right across Jawa who produced the occasional keris blade.
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