highly dressed keris

nechesh · 4th November 2005, 11:37 PM

Hi Simatua. I'm surprised no one has made any comments yet. It does indeed appear to be a nice, well formed and old keris. Nice catch. I will leave it to others to argue tangguh on this one.

As to whether it belonged to a person of high rank or not i couldn't say for sure. Firstly, many keris that you will find for sale now-a-days aren't necessarily in the ensemble they were in as cultural artifacts. Many times parts are switched out to make a keris more appealing in the market place. That being said, if this keris is dressed as it would have been for it's Javanese owner then i would say that it would belong to a person who had at least some money OR the relative he recieved it from did. I'm not sure i would necessarily equate having money with "rank", though they do sometimes go hand in hand. I would doubt this is a court piece.
Anyway, it is an attractive old keris with a very nice pendok. I also like the wood of the wrongko very much.
BTW, i know more than one person who regularly take antique keris out of Indonesia. I wasn't aware there was a problem with the practice.

4th November 2005, 11:37 PM	#2
nechesh Member Join Date: Dec 2004 Location: Cincinnati, OH Posts: 940	Hi Simatua. I'm surprised no one has made any comments yet. It does indeed appear to be a nice, well formed and old keris. Nice catch. I will leave it to others to argue tangguh on this one. As to whether it belonged to a person of high rank or not i couldn't say for sure. Firstly, many keris that you will find for sale now-a-days aren't necessarily in the ensemble they were in as cultural artifacts. Many times parts are switched out to make a keris more appealing in the market place. That being said, if this keris is dressed as it would have been for it's Javanese owner then i would say that it would belong to a person who had at least some money OR the relative he recieved it from did. I'm not sure i would necessarily equate having money with "rank", though they do sometimes go hand in hand. I would doubt this is a court piece. Anyway, it is an attractive old keris with a very nice pendok. I also like the wood of the wrongko very much. BTW, i know more than one person who regularly take antique keris out of Indonesia. I wasn't aware there was a problem with the practice.