European 'yataghans'

[Victrix]

Originally Posted by Jim McDougall

This example just posted by Eftihis in Ethnographic on 2012 thread updates… On this example, note the inscribed devices etc. on blade, which is as seen straight, and these correspond more to the Caissagnard style from France I had noted earlier.

An observer’s comment on an inscription on a schiavona once alerted me to the now extinct Bosnian Cyrillic language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_Cyrillic. ”After the Ottoman conquest, Bosnian Cyrillic was used, along with Arebica, by the Bosnian Muslim nobility, chiefly in correspondence, mainly from the 15th to 17th centuries (hence, the script has also been called begovica, "bey's script"). Isolated families and individuals could write in it even in the 20th century.” So what we thought were occult symbols may in fact be part of unfamiliar or now extinct script. Several of the letters inscribed on the sword seem to match letters in Bosnian Cyrillic.