Thread: Dagger!
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Old 10th August 2018, 09:08 AM   #12
motan
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Join Date: Apr 2016
Location: Jerusalem
Posts: 274
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Hi Helleri,
You are right. Unfortunately, I don't have any watertight alternative. Because "groups" of daggers are not actual entities, what you call a specific dagger is, to some degree, a matter of preference (see discussion on Karud in this forum).
In my view, collecting and describing old weapons is a fancy with scientific pretensions (sorry). Even if you find a name for a dagger in old books, you can not assume that the writer knew what he was talking about. Especially older writers used their imagination quite often and copied names from each other without checking. Genuine local names are an important information, but not always known or used by collectors. Therefore, they have their disadvantages too.
I guess that if you say Syrian Jambiya, most collectors will know what you mean and I have nothing against that. I personally would prefer "Middle Eastern curved daggers" as family name because I don't think that many Kurds, Syrians or Berbers will know what Jambiya is.
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