Newbie: Lots of Help Needed!

[buddhantraining]

Hi Guys,

I just found this forum last night (thankfully!) and have been reading as much as I can before I decided to make a post. I could really use everyone's help and would be so grateful for whatever comments I receive on this. Here's the story:

A very, very dear friend of mine has given me two arms - a talibon (which I just found out was a talibon last night thanks to you guys!) and a sword. Both are obviously old/antiques/whatever you want to call them. This is my first time even coming into contact with these sorts of things so I truly know nothing about this field of collecting. My friend was given these two pieces when he was a small child and he is now 68 years old - they were antiques when given to him - and he has no knowledge of where they came from or anything else.

I'm not familiar with how to post photos so I uploaded them to my Shutterfly account, they can be viewed here: http://share.shutterfly.com/osi.jsp?i=EeANGzhqyZt3DgI

Although I know the one is a talibon, I'm a bit confused about it's sheath. The carvings on the sheath seem very patriotic to me which wouldn't make much sense given the age of the talibon. Does anyone have any idea about the symbols on the carvings? Anyone seen anything like this before? I've spent months trying to research this stuff and haven't even found anything remotely similar anywhere on the net.

As far as the sword goes - I'm completely clueless. Hopefully the photos will be clear enough to be able to see the markings of the nude men and women and such. There are very intricate carvings on the base of the blade which were too fine to show up in the photos so I drew them out by hand and they look pretty exact. I hope that is helpful.

Again, I'd really appreciate any light that you guys could shed on this stuff for me. Even if I had a direction to research on, it's better than nothing. Thanks, fellas )

Best Regards,
Mr. Lace