Nomadic swords

[Philip]

Originally Posted by ariel

Hi Philip,

Thanks for addressing the issue of Tunkou.
I want to pick your brain a little deeper.
First, a seller's pic of a Khazar saber from the Ukraine, allegedly 7-9 century. Hope to have it in my hands within a week or two. Its tunkou is of a traditional early form: long arm goes along the edge.
Next, 2 figs from David Nicolle's book ( presumably Daghestan , 13-14 century), ##645 and 646
One tunkou is just like yours and mine, another is kind of a square with a slit in the middle ( some later Chinese ones have it)
After that Iran, ~1306-1304. Something happened, tunkous flipped over: the long arm goes along the spine, ##626f and 626o.

The last one is a fresco of St. Nikita from Serbian Gracanica church, finished in 1321. Again, the long arm is on the top.

After that all tunkous , both functional and decorative, from Mughals, Iran, Ottoman Empire follow the same pattern.

Seems like the westward migrating Turks changed their Tunkous sometimes ~12-13 centuries, whereas eastward migrating ( China, SE Asia) stayed with the classical pattern. Japanese habaki may be an analog of a plain sleeve-like type.

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Ariel, you raise some very interesting issues.

The matter of specific shapes, especially whether the long side is on the edge or dorsal side of the blade, is interesting. I tend to put more confidence in what the surviving objects show. Works of art are a valuable tool for the arms historian, but there is always the consideration of artistic license. Especially in cultures and eras in which fidelity to minute details did not approach the standards set by the figurative art of Renaissance Europe and subsequent eras (at least until our modern age of abstract art!). Which is not to dismiss it entirely; it's just that we must be prepared, on occasion, to take elements cum grano salis until we have the occasion to let surviving examples of the objects speak for themselves.

The tunkou or its equivalent on Ottoman arms is worthy of further study. I will resize some images for my next post to show that a survival of the original concept (edge side longer) can be seen on some Mamluk and early Otto saber blades. But then we have the case of yataghans, on which a similar component is oriented the other way -- long side along the spine. I wonder if we should consider these disparate designs as coming from the same origin, or perhaps growing from disparate roots. Let's look at proto-yataghan blade shapes (recurved, single edged) from earlier cultures to see if antecedents exist for this specific component. Do you know of any such recurved blades being made and used in those same Eurasian nomad cultures that gave us the saber and pallasch? I recall seeing something like this in a Soviet publication on the Yenisei watershed finds, but need to dig it out and check. You are perhaps more familiar with this material than I am!

As re the Japanese habaki, which is the same length on both edge and dorsal sides (with a straight or slightly convex frontal contour), perhaps we need to regard that as an independent development, sprouting on its own on Japanese soil. Or perhaps sharing a common origin with the same feature on Korean single-edged swords, since the two cultures do seem to have common cultural-political-linguistic threads in archaic and early medieval epochs. Another feature which distinguishes the habacki from its continental counterpart is its distal (side-to-side) dimension. There is a notable taper, from rear to front, in thickness. Also, many of them tend to have a lateral "step" from having each face constructed of two pieces of metal, so that the posterior portion is actually two plates one atop the other. A tunkou lacks both these distinguishing characteristics.