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Old 21st March 2015, 08:00 AM   #9
A. G. Maisey
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Join Date: May 2006
Posts: 6,705
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Bill, I believe that the person who sold you this keris is a bloke by the name of Alan G. Maisey.

I know this bloke pretty well, and in his recollection he has not received any correspondence from you for some years.

If you care to resend those emails that you believe I failed to respond to, to my current email address I'll be happy to respond to them.

PM me and I'll supply my current email address.

I probably no longer have the description available that I provided when you bought this keris, but just looking at what I can see, it is unlikely that the stones in the selut are intan, much more likely that they are rose cut rock crystal (Yakut). Any selut with even low quality intan is a pretty expensive proposition.

The red velvet backing to the krawangan slorok has absolutely no court association at all. This is a good quality dress keris, and the colour of the backing for the slorok is artistic rather than being meant to carry any hierarchical code for court use. The use of a cloth or plated backing for a krawangan pendok permits the colour of the backing material to be altered to harmonise with the attire of the wearer or the nature of the occasion.

Red kemalo pendoks are used for court wear certainly, but this pendok is not kemalo, it is silver. There are a couple of different shades of red, one used by young men, the other by older men of defined hierarchical levels. This is so in the Surakarta court, in other courts I do not know the designations nor regulations.

The blade is probably not Madura, it is more likely to be early current era Central Jawa. I would not any longer have any purchase records of this keris, but I believe it would have been acquired prior to the time when the Madura makers began producing this type of blade. People tend to forget that as late as the mid-1990's the vast bulk of blades coming out of Madura looked nothing like a Javanese keris at all.

In any case, I would not have stated any age for this keris, it is not really able to have a tangguh classification applied, but rather could be considered a generic Central Javanese keris.

It is most definitely not antique, by any recognized legal standard. "Antique" means more than 100 years old. This keris is not more than 100 years old.

If you care to provide me with an approximate date of purchase I may be able to check my hard-copy records when I return home in another month or so, it is possible I may have a précis of the description I provided you with at the time of purchase.
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