Ethiopian swords

[Lew]

Bill

I have two pieces in my collection one is the sword I posted the other is an Afar dagger with the same type of horn hilt it has both light and dark horn on it composite three separate pieces. I compared it to my rhino horn jambiya and I did the wet hand test. The hilt felt smooth to me the rhino horn jambiya on the other hand was a bit tacky. This is due to the matrix described earlier. I tried it again on the smooth part of the rhino hilt where there was no cross section of the fibers and it was smooth feeling? So maybe the sticky feeling is due do the cross section cutting the horn against the grain rather than with the grain? I also noticed that rhino horn when seen as against the grain looks like what you would see on the surface of an orange peel. Also that hole in the bottom piece of your sword is just like many I have seen on this type of sword including mine. Lastly considering there were probably tens of thousands of these swords made over the years the hilts would have to have been made from a more accessible and plentiful source such as cattle horn there just was not enough rhinos around to fill the bill.

Lew