Qajar or Afsharid ?

[Philip]

Originally Posted by Kubur

Clearly it is not a sex toy...
So probably a baby zulfiqar... It will make more sense in Persian context.

Well, Iran has quite a tradition of eroticism in the arts. I thought that the poetic expression was Sufistic spiritualism expressed in a physical metaphor, but some years ago a collector showed me a 18th or 19th cent. khanjar, with a nice black wootz blade and an exquisitely carved ivory grip of classic form, inscriptions top and bottom, with a scene that left nothing to the imagination. Neither of us could read the lingo, I still wonder what the script said.