Old Khyber

[mahratt]

Originally Posted by Kubur

Acid etching is an old technique and Persians did a lot of acid etching on their weapons and armours, including animal and humans figures... Afghans and Persians are neighbours so i don't see any problem to have a rider on the blade... What the text is saying??

Persians are Shiites, and Afghans, if I am not mistaken, are Sunnis. And the Sunnits are forbidden to make images of animals and humans...

But if I am wrong, correct me please. Unfortunately, I do not know examples of images of a person or animals on the blades of an old Afghan weapon

[Kubur]

Originally Posted by mahratt

Persians are Shiites, and Afghans, if I am not mistaken, are Sunnis. And the Sunnits are forbidden to make images of animals and humans...

But if I am wrong, correct me please. Unfortunately, I do not know examples of images of a person or animals on the blades of an old Afghan weapon

You are right.

[ariel]

As per Wikipedia, somewhere between 5-20% of Afghanis are Shia.
Those are the so-called Twelvers " Farsiwan" Hazara , living in the western provinces of Herat and Farah. Other Twelvers are Bayat and Qizilbash communities. There are also Nizari Ismailis in Badakhshan and Sayeeds of Kayan. And let's not forger Sufi Afghanis.

Sunni Islam forbids images of Allah, Muhammed and/or major Prophets, but frowns upon other living imagery without explicitly banning it. Although the so-called Sword of David ( Daud) , an early Islamic sword from the collection in Topkapi Palace carries an image of a human figure with distinct facial features.
Only Wahhabis and Salafis ban images of anything else, but those are of much more modern appearance and concentrate on the far east of the country.

Afghanistan is a multi-ethnic country, and painting Afghanis as uniform community and uniformly Sunnis is superficial.

Perhaps, this could serve as an ethnographic sign of the origin of this Knyber.

[mahratt]

It would be interesting to look at the Ottoman weapons of the 19th century, on which there are images of man and animals. After all, the Ottomans are not Wahhabis, if I understand correctly? Of course, we are not talking about the use by the Ottomans of Persian blades, on which were originally images of animals.

I understand that this will not be entirely by topic, but I just want to learn more from more experienced hobby colleagues.

And it’s even more interesting to see a really old Khyber knife in good condition, on the blade of which images will be made in such a technique as on the subject that we are discussing.

Marius wrote very accurately:

Originally Posted by mariusgmioc

Acid etching MAY be an "old" (please define what you mean by "old") technique, but Persians did NOT use it before 19th century, and even then for very specific and few items (mostly decorative, historicism - known as Qajar revival - blades decorated with religious texts).