Early shibriyas revisited

[motan]

Hi A.alnakkas, thanks for your response. When I inteprted the date, I assumed that the lowest vertical line on the second digit is part of a strangely written digit 3. I have seen several strange Arabic digits 3 in the past (http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showth...=Syrian+dagger for example). However, on better inspection I admit that it could be just a nick-there are several other nicks in the pic. In that case, it should indeed be read as 1252, which corresponds to 1836-7 (not 1852) and that puts the whole question of age of these daggers on very loose ground.
However, I do not believe that this dagger is really from early 19th. I have not seen any pictures of shibriyas from before 1900, although the evidence is very scant. The earliest photographs I have of bedouins from this region that carry a dagger show daggers that are not exactly shibriyas (discussed in http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showth...ight=Shibriyas). The only picture I have of a bedouin with this type of dagger is from the 1930'. So I call the evidence inconclusive and I have to keep searching...