Good grief! .....Corsican?!! heres a new one!!
Just for kicks, check out the search feature here (its on the top header line, click on it and fill in the line with 'Berber sabre').
These are a 19th century phenomenon......and as we have discussed many times here over the past decade, these seem to have appeared as an anomaly about 15 or so years ago and represented as Berber sabres from the Rif in Morocco. This was the information Tirri was following as he wrote his book ,which is actually a beautifully published book for what it is..a collectors guide. Most of the information is pretty reliable though, and was based on the information on hand at the time it was published.
I got one of these about then, and after looking closely at the blade, realized it was a heavily profiled tip on a British M1796 light cavalry sabre. The scabbard had a curious vertical protrusion similar to many Ethiopian scabbard forms for the gurade (in "African Weapons" by Spring). What was most curious, as I have mentioned on many threads, is that these distinctly recognizable sabres do not appear in any of the standard references dealing with Moroccan weapons. It would seem that Buttin would have had one of these in his huge collection as he lived in Morocco for many years, and had every weapon form known there in the 19th c and earlier.
I have seen these turn up in Mexican weapons groupings, the Cuban suggestion stands as plausible, and there have even been suggestions for the far reach of the Spanish trade empire, the Philippines or even Indonesia.
We have finally established one of these mystery weapons as Cuban (Spanish American machete thread), but the jury is still out on this one.....the Corsican wild card is a good one though!!
