Thanks for posting these Colin, always good to see more kaskaras
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Originally Posted by stephen wood
The blades on the others seem curiously younger than the crossguards.
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Stephen, I'm not doubting your suggestion at all, but I wonder what gives you the clue that the blades are younger than the crossguards? It certainly would be curious were this to be the case.
Is there any way of dating flared diamond profile crossguards except the 'X' mark (which I can almost believe I seen on the left hand picture)? I'm interested because I have a similar quite tidy kaskara, no 'x' but a local blade which I assumed was C20th.
I must admit to also being a little confused about exactly who carried these and when. Pre C20 I assume that kaskara were the province of the wealthy or higher classes since descriptions of the general arms facing the British in their Sudanese campaigns primarily describes spears and even wooden swords. But there are a lot of these functional looking kaskaras about, so I'm wondering if the current view is that the weapon proliferated around the turn of the century. If so do we have many authenticated older examples with native blades, or is the native blade a good clue to a later origin?
Chris