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Old 16th April 2009, 06:06 AM   #32
fearn
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Join Date: Dec 2004
Posts: 1,247
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Hi Jim,

I'd point out one wee little detail that we've all been forgetting. Alexander's army wasn't the only way the khukri could have gotten to Nepal.

See, I was thinking about two disconnected facts. One is that the kopis is essentially the falcata, a Iberian Spanish design. In fact, there's a bunch of badly defined, forward curving, one and two-handed weapons from Iron Age Europe (falx, falcata, sica, rhomphaeia, etc). Some of these undoubtedly looked like the kopis, some did not.

Then there are those mummies they found in the Tarim Basin of the Xinjiang desert. Those mummies date from 1300 BCE, or Bronze Age.

No one's sure who they were. Aryans?

The one thing that is certain, there were people moving back and forth on the predecessors of the Silk Road from at least 1300 BCE, so that gives us roughly 2000 years to transfer the kopis design to Nepal, assuming that the Nepalese didn't invent it independently, or get the idea from a Turkish yataghan somewhere along the line.

That's a lot of time to transfer an idea, I think.

F
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