It would be nice to have photographs of inhabitants of a defined country carrying old weapons of a particular design. Regretfully, such opportunities come very infrequently.
We are dealing with historical weapons and a good proportion of them went out of use before photography became available. Moreover, some localities were not easily reachable.
Take Afghani ch’huras, for example. Some people scoured the internet in search of photographs of mid-19 century Afghanis carrying ch’huras and found none.
Well, British military expeditions through the Khyber pass were highly risky enterprises and likely tended not to include photographers with their bulky equipment.
And what conclusions can we reach from the absence of such photographs and their sudden later appearance? That ch’huras came to existence only in the 20 century, as a result of pacification of Afghanistan and minituarization of photographic equipment?
The golden rule of science is that absence of evidence does not signify evidence of absence.
Thus, absence of photographs of the above “Berber” swords would not support or reject their Moroccan or Central American origin.
We are limited to contemporaneous drawings, locations of their finding and written accounts.
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