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Originally Posted by migueldiaz
The following are excerpts from the book Philippine Ancestral Gold, which deals mainly with local 10th to 13th century AD artifacts.
We can see that in the area of craftsmanship then, only Philippines was at par with Java in the region.
I understand that this is not a direct proof with regard to the subject of this thread. I guess my only point is that the Philippines too must have had influenced Java a lot, in the general area of design of cultural objects, which included weapons. |
Miguel, there is no doubt of the skill of early craftsmanship of these old gold artifacts. I have been aware of this work for some time. However, it is still apples and oranges.
If you can show me a Moro kris that can be legitimately dated to this same period (13th or 14th century) of time that has all the features of the Javanese keris of that same period, that might be a game changer. Frankly i have never seen one that can be dated earlier than the 16th or 17th century at best (Cato is more conservative and calls these 18th century, but i think they must date a little older than that).
Getting back to tangs, these really early ("archaic") Moro kris that i have seen have not really developed yet into the slashing weapon they were to become. They are smaller (many not much longer than the blade length of many Bali keris) with much thinner width and a pointiness which infers that stabbing was still the main function. I have not had the opportunity to examine the tangs on these very early kris, but they could probably still be fairly effective as stabbing weapons if they still had a round or even square tang. It is only as the weapon gets larger and more intended for slashing that a rectangular tang becomes more necessary. Ron's kris shows that at least some of these early kris retained the round tang of their Indonesian cousins, though i would image that Moro smiths were probably trying different things at the time to develop a more effective weapon to use against the Spaniards.