[ariel]

Ed,

I have no idea how Mamluk and Ottoman guards were secured. I looked at mine and could not find any mastique or rivets. Sudanese and Syrians used wrappings of different materials and degree of sophistication. On top of purely engineering questions there is the atrocious quality of Yucel illustrations : see my pictures. It seems superficially that Ottoman guards just fit their upper langets into slots of the handle. But that would not assure any security of attachment and there are many examples of bent langets totally outside of the slots and the guards are still rock solid.

If anybody here knows the secret, I would be very grateful for revealing it to me.


I do not think we have to insist on absolute similarity of handles to claim
belonging to the same family. Persian, North and South Arabian, Baloch, Turkish or Indian shamshirs have very different handles, but there is no doubt that they belong to the same family and have a common ancestor: their blades are the same and often came from the same source i.e. Persian trade blades.

Kaskaras and early Mamluk swords have remarkably similar blades, and the added similarity of crossguards is just an additional point. Not a miracle, taking into account geographic proximity and close relations between the two societies. Whether the original source was pre-Islamic Arabia or Byzantine spathion I do not know. One can even speculate that even pre-Islamic straight swords came from the spathion. Then one might get boggle down in the question of Sassanid straight swords and the spathion etc. Separating descent and parallel development is always a semi-impossible task. The word “perhaps” must be used generously:-)

Your point about Abbasids is well taken, but that is not what I had in mind. It is not that Sudanese copied slender Persian guards ( which they did not), but the Ottomans. I must have not made myself clear. Sorry.