KINDJAL?? QAMA?? FOR COMMENT

[A Senefelder]

because it was ~10 times more expensive to make and took a lot of time.

That it is. Having made a number of knife weight billets of pattern welded steel in the past, several friends and I set about making a sword weight billet one weekend last month. Intended to be a totally random pattern starting with five layers of 1075, two of hand file, one of bandsaw blade and one of nickle, it took three men, using a propane forge with a blower on the air intake ( this allows us to generate forgewelding heat ) and two 15 pound sledghammers it took us a full eight hours to get a billet weighing three pounds with dimentions of 2.2 inches high, 6.5 inches long and 2 inches wide and our arms we shot from the heavy hammer work. We are maybe 5% of the way to having this billet made into a sword blade at this point. This little experiment shed some light on the intense amount of physical work that would have gone into making these sorts of steels.

[kahnjar1]

Sorry it's taken so long. Here are some better pics of the back of the scabbard.
The neillo on the front is as it was when I got this piece, and has not been cleaned by me. The sharpness of the decoration is presumably due to fact that (assuming the provenance is correct) this piece has been in a collection for quite some time, so the normal wear and tear of use has not happened. Comments here have prompted me to realise just how "nasty" that added centre piece is, and I am now very tempted to remove it.......What do you think?? The original leather is underneath.
Regards Stuart

[Sylektis]

A small (22cm) with similar technique from a tourist-antique shop in Greece...