[ariel]

The " Front Asian", allegedly Kazakh, example from Tashkent from the Russian Ethnographic Muzeum was not the only bizarre item from that album.

Items #162 and 163 both with Laz configuration of their blades and eared pommels beat the " Kazakh" one in their astonishing attribution.
One was brought to the muzeum in 1925, another was registered there in 1954. Both were attributed as " Iranians, Kurds", although #163 had yet another potential place of birth: Turkey.

Both blades look suspiciously like reworked Chassepot bayonets. The original Chassepot was slightly yataghan-ish, but both creations exaggerated their double curvatures to caricature-ish proportion. The blade of Chassepot was 57.2 cm, but as the results of extensive "plastic surgery" their lengths ( from base to tip) were shortened to 49 and 55 cm respectively.
Both were given museum labels defining them as " Khopesh". The local weapons gurus in Leningrad never asked themselves a question, how and why Egyptian Khopesh existing as bronze and, later, as iron variant between ~2500 BCE to ~1300 BCE and never appearing anywhere from there on, was reborn 3-4 millennia later out of the blue in Iran or Kurdistan of all places...

The rest of that book was predictably just as illiterate, and the authors expained away their nonsense by : a). not enough time; and b). bureaucratic problems of changing the existing muzeum labels.

Anyone objecting to my use of word "execrable" as an evaluation of that book, might better change his opinion :-((((

Few scientific books and even articles are immediately accepted as 100% correct ( Watson and Crick's paper on the double helix of DNA is a rare exception). But as a minimum, almost any really good academic book will still contain 5% of it as some arguable points. That is how science works.
But publishing a book in which what is new is not right and what is right is not new is simply an exercise in shameless graphomania.
The above book is a stark example of it.