Point well taken Ed. On Ariel's sword this 'fly' is configured and in the same position as the Kull shop must have consistently applied, and there is no doubt this is a European blade. If you note the area where the legs are typically distinguishable it is solid on Ariel's...…..which seemed unusual...but not a 'deal breaker'. If it is simply 'dirty' then understandable, but I had not seen that possibility.
I don't think I had suggested the fly was copper filled, at least at cant see where I did, but my writing is often tangled.
In conversations some years ago, we had discussed the possibility that Solingen might have had some business producing blades specifically for the market in North Africa. In this case, it seems possible that these spurious markings copper filled could have been applied by the Kull shop. It is curious that Kull marked blades in North Africa have these lion and cross and orb marks....and why do they appear on takoubas c. 1916.
Yet here we have a kaskara…..a quite different context......with the kull mark and the same copper filled markings.
If Kull ceased in 1860, then these blades either lingered in the Saharan sphere for the next 50 years, or someone else was using the stamp and process of copper filled lion and cross and orb .
That was my idea in pondering this unusual situation with these markings. The lion was a favored symbol in the Sahara, as was the cross and orb, so these would understandably be added to blades. Such combinations were atypical in Europe, so the idea of the blades being European intended and ending up in North Africa seems unlikely.
The idea that some mysterious entrepot in North Africa was almost uniformly applying these copper filled markings and on exclusively Kull blades seems a bit far fetched......but of course not impossible.
If Solingen was indeed sending blades specifically to North Africa, that is the thing that many of us have wondered and hoped to find records of in Solingen. However thus far, there has been no success I know of in finding any such record there, and virtually the only references we have are the histories by Cronau and Weyersburg. These do not note any such record as far as I have known so we remain at square one.
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