Thank you for your offer.
At this point, I must ask, why would a souk worker take a perfectly good complete with scabbrd antique flexible dance sword from antiquity, with wonderful culturally important fittings, design and artistry and history and being culturally important itself in its complete form, then remove the blade, then somehow fit a thicker fighting type blade in to a scabbard meant for its thinner brother, join the hilt in some manner that does not in any way disturb one ounce of age and patina and sell it as a [????] to tourists....seems rather odd that Omani Souk owners are destroying cultural heritage in an exercise of wasted time and resources when it would be just as easy to sell the original sword...Then what happens to the flexible blade? Does it then get dressed in modern leather, steel and silver of which I only see a couple of in the photos compared to the dozens and dozens of what I'd call beaters in the rest of the photos....
Gavin
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