Gustav's Discovery

[A. G. Maisey]

Rasdan, I do appreciate the thought you have put into your posts, and you have raised a couple of interesting points.I'm still thinking about what you have put up, and I'll get back to what you propose later.

Gustav has not given full length images of the keris he has posted, and speaking for myself, if these truly did come into Europe several hundred years ago, I would not know if they were old or new from a photo. In fact, even in the hand I probably could not guess age.

Again, speaking only of the keris, that is the blade, for early keris, keris from the period immediately following the Mojo era, that narrow little strip of water between Jawa and Bali meant nothing in terms of contact:- water was/is a highway, not a barrier. Other things were barriers, but not the water.

Sure, we can look at the dress and we can say the handle or the scabbard demonstrates style that is attributable to a particular area, but we cannot do that with early blades, it is not until Islamic influence got a good strong foothold in Jawa that blade style of Javanese and Balinese keris began to vary.

So lets not try to categorise any of these very small parts of keris, that have no provenance, into "Jawa" or "Bali" or anywhere else. Even if they did have provenance, any provenance is always open to question in the final analysis, and trying to draw too many conclusions from images of keris is perhaps the ultimate folly:- it simply cannot be done, in fact most of the people I learnt from in Solo would not give more than a cursory comment to an image of a keris, they needed it in their hand to form any supportable opinion, and to a large degree, I'm pretty much the same.

All this is a diversion from focus on this newly revealed feature that Gustav has given us.

Might it be possible to return our attention to the difficult matter of identification of this design element?