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Originally Posted by fearn
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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Excellent Fearn, and very pertinant perspective. I agree that the kopis mystery is certainly a cause for considerable confusion in trying to determine these weapon forms origins. While it seems that it is well recognized that these various forward curved weapons from numerous cultures ...and as noted well beyond the Greek kopis, preceded the weapons seen in the Indian iconography.
The Silk Road is a very good point, and "The Mummies of Urumchi" is a great book on these mysterious Caucasian mummies found in the Tarim. I think trying to determine the direction of cultural diffusion is pretty confusing, especially from my admittedly limited understanding of archaeological methods. Still the presence of that 'traffic' which certainly carried important elements over wide range, certainly may have accounted for the arrival of such edged weapon forms in the regions discussed. I have often regarded a number of possibilities for Indian weapon forms coming from Bronze Age China, which certainly must have followed these routes.
Good points on the kukri superceding the kora also. The kukri does seem a far more effective and universally used weapon.
All best regards,
Jim