Saifs

[Nihl]

Originally Posted by ariel

Nihl classified sabers according to the Polish school despite officially defining himself as belonging to the Indian one: by the handle:-)

Ariel, with all due respect, please do not tell me how I classify things. I found that your comment there rather rubbed me the wrong way.

I think perhaps my system might simply be too nuanced for you; you'll note that I, like I said I did, listed out both the hilt and blade origin when defining each sword, with the exception of the tulwar, for reasons I described in my previous post. Perhaps the shorthand description I gave of each sword (before the semicolon) confused you, but I think even then I was true to my word.

I gave brief descriptions like "turkish shamshir" and "syrian shamshir", which I think is accurate to my beliefs (or my "school"). If I cared more about the hilt, then I would not have included the term "shamshir", which describes the blade. Rather, I would have said "turkish kilij" and "syrian saif". If I had cared more about the blades, then I simply would have described all of them as just shamshirs. The tulwar, like I already said, I feel I have justified in my previous post, but perhaps I should have said "an indian tulwar with a persian shamshir blade" if I had known someone was going to give my post such a vapid analysis. I wanted to keep things brief as I do have a tendency to ramble otherwise.

[ariel]

Nihl,

I am sorry you took my comments the way you did. No ill intent was meant. You can classify objects any way you wish, but in fact your definitions of all of them fully coincided with the so-called " Polish system", i.e. primacy of the hilt, even in the case of a saber with Persian blade and Indian handle. That's all. There is nothing personal.

Yes, I know that Elgood also stressed separate descriptions of blade and hit. But in his case it was done with purely Indian objects composed of parts of different ages.

There are many ways how to name "composite" swords: Fiegel used the blade as a determining factor, Polish school uses the hilt, and there is no easy way to sum up every feature to describe swords belonging to a specific area but incorporating features/parts of multiple origin ( the Baluch/Omani saber is an example, likely because of long-standing tight relations of both geographic areas).

It is immaterial what kind of moniker we give to a sword as long as our description of its construction is openly listed. In any case, the contemporaneous local users most likely called them by their own local monikers. Throughout the Arab world all Indian tulwars, Moroccan nimchas and Turkish Kilijes were just " saifs", and virtually identical janbiyas were janbiyas in Yemen, but khanjars in Oman and had multiple different names in Aravia depending on the tribe. What we call Pulwar in our lingo, was just a shamshir for the Afghanis. We are not carrying those swords into battle and our lives do not depend on them. We are just collectors and our only law of the land is how to describe them in the most accurate way comprehensible to our colleagues.

And, as we know, there are at least 9 ways to skin the cat:-)

Peace?