Twisted rods

[Gustav]

Dear Kerislovers,

today an interesting blade was auctioned. The sheath likely is not made for it. What are your thoughts about the origin of it - East Java, Bali, or Lombok?

Is there something about such Pamor Tangkis, with two rods on one, and one rod on other side?

[Battara]

Based on what I see, I was thinking on Bali.....

[A. G. Maisey]

Interesting thing you've posted here Gustav.

I'm sorry, but to make any comment on this I would need to handle it, & even then I might not be able to understand what I would need to understand before commenting.

In respect of overall perceived point of origin, yes, this does imply Bali.

[RobT]

Hi All,

Please consider this observation in light of my relative ignorance of Indonesian keris but I count 8 luk and the center ridge appears to wander off point. Could the blade have been shortened?

Sincerely,
RobT

[A. G. Maisey]

Rob, like a lot of other things with the keris, what you see is not what you get.

The picture shows how we count luk now.

But luk have been counted in different ways in different times & places.

A bloke by the name of "Maisey" has hypothesized that the keris as it had developed during the Mojopahit era in East Jawa had waves (luk) introduced into its form as a type of hierarchical indicator. This hypothesis was founded on information provided by a Bali-Hindu priest, and comparison with still existing ways in which hierarchical indicators within the Balinese socio-cultural fabric are applied now, & have in the past, been applied.

After the Islamic domination of Javanese society, and the separation of Balinese socio-cultural norms from Javanese socio-cultural norms a different method of wave count was introduced by the now Muslim overlords. The reason for this was that it was now necessary to wean the populace of Jawa away from the old Hindu-Buddhist & indigenous systems of belief and bring them under the new Islamic umbrella.

The keris was not only a weapon, it was very much more, and its symbolism was far too intertwined with the old systems of belief, so certain things needed to change. One of those things was the way in which the waves of a keris blade were counted. The new overlords did a similar thing with the Javanese wayang, & for the same reasons.

The above is an over-simplification of a simplification.

This will give a slightly better picture:-

https://kerisattosanaji.com/interpre...e-keris-page-1

even this more complete text only gives a part of the story, there is more in a chapter I contributed to a book of philosophy that was published a couple of years back, but really, I, or somebody else, needs to give some time to trying to get the whole story out there in one piece.

[A. G. Maisey]

Here is the picture.

[Gustav]

Gentlemen, thank you!

There is this blade in the National Museum of Denmark, EDb 16. Alan, we once argued, if it has one rod on one side, and two on the other. Difficult to see, because the blade is polished in Europe. If yes, it would have the same configuration of Pamor - one twisted rod on "outside", two on holders side.

Of course it likely comes from different cultural context.

[A. G. Maisey]

Possibly.

[David]

I don't know. I am inclined NOT to see a Balinese blade here. I would be interested in knowing what aspects of this Blade point to Bali for those that think so.
Gustav, do we have a blade length for this keris?

[RobT]

Alan Maisey,

Thanks for your response. I realize that there should be a ninth luk as you indicated. The problem I had was, although the center ridge appears to curve to show luk nine, the blade edges don’t. That was what prompted me to wonder if the tip of the blade hadn’t been modified.

Sincerely,
RobT

[Gustav]

David, there was only the overall length given - 61 cm. So I think, the blade length could be about 40 cm or just a little bit more.

[A. G. Maisey]

Rob, there almost never is a visible 9th luk in a keris, Javanese, Balinese or otherwise, the final luk at the leading end of the blade is an imaginary luk, put there because the number of luk MUST be a MALE number, that is, an uneven number. It must be a male number because the keris itself is a male entity.

If the luk of this blade were to be counted in the Hindu-Javanese manner then the luk count would be 7, which is the number of TRUE luk in this blade, but because Javanese society has been the dominant society in the region for so long, Javanese societal norms have replaced some other norms over time, this is something that other peoples in the region have been complaining about for a very long time.

So now the Islamic count dominates.

When this blade was made, the maker would have been following a pattern that would have required the point of the blade to be offset a specific distance from a vertical line beginning at the center point of the pesi (tang) at the point of its entry to the blade body (or alternatively, the gonjo) and proceeding to the point of the blade. To achieve this offset it would have been necessary to return to the forge and use hot-work, or if he was lucky, to use stock removal only. In any case, the offset dominates the required work.

This blade has suffered erosion from the time it left the maker's hands, that erosion has taken a few millimeters from its original length, but it has not been intentionally shortened by a sufficient amount for it to lose a full luk, this can be very easily seen by simply looking at proportion & what we refer to as "pawakan" (overall visual perception).

The above is the reason that the central weld line is not central to the blade edges.

A keris maker, be he an empu/Empu/mpu or a pandai keris or a pandai besi will in 99.9% of cases be working to a required pattern. This might not have been the case more than 500 years ago, but in more recent times it has been the case. Keris makers do not just pick up their tools & make whatever they please, they always have certain parameters to work to, & have had for a very long time.

[A. G. Maisey]

Gustav, in respect of your post #7.

I have now had a chance to examine my photographs and notes of EDb16.

I cannot recall that we had an argument about the way in which this pamor had been produced, but we probably did discuss it, I say this because in my notes I commented:-

"The pamor in this K. is skillfully manipulated"

as you have remarked, this pamor pattern was very difficult to see, it did not come through in my photographs, which were not particularly big images, I was using a Canon S95 & in raw, this produced images that were adequate for what I was doing at the time, but even with more modern (this was 2012 I think) & more sophisticated equipment, I doubt that the pamor could have been captured.

In fact, that pamor was so difficult to see that I sketched the motif, & here below is that sketch. I've forgotten what my impressions were at the time, but looking at the sketch, my impression now is that if a bar was used to produce this pamor, that bar was probably tightly twisted & then bent into a series of "S" bends, something similar a lawe setukal pamor, but in different orientation.

This was a large, strongly made keris, ample evidence that by the 17th century smiths in Jawa did have more than adequate skills to produce very refined blades.

After that visit to the museum's stored collections I did exchange some correspondence with the curator there, & in that correspondence I was advised that this keris was in the collection from at least 1674, possibly earlier.

[Gustav]

Alan, thank you for the insights on EDb 16.

Two more pictures from the auction house, a better view for the grasp of Blumbangan side, and the Walang Sinudhuk side of the tip.

[Gustav]

An update:

blade length: 36,8 cm. Gonjo length: 8 cm. It isn't Keris Lombok, the question is - East Java or Bali?

It has an old, very smooth finish, which is commonly associated with Bali, yet in the first part of 19th cent. such finish was possible also on East Javanese Keris.

Sheath likely is made for the blade, blade is evenly sunken in, inside of sheath is not fiddled with recently, sheath is on small side, yet acceptable for Balinese Keris.

Kendhit on hilt is natural.

[Gustav]

With sheath.

[A. G. Maisey]

If I apply the Surakarta tangguh indicators to this keris blade, it is unmistakably Madura --- which makes it East Jawa.

[David]

Here is another Bali dressed keris with pamor tangkis. I am curious what the consensus might be on the origins of this blade. It is perfectly fitted to the sarong so clearly this dress was made specifically for the blade. Length is jusrt shy of 38cm.

[A. G. Maisey]

This is a brief summary taken from Surakarta sources of indicators for a keris blade made in Madura:-

coarse iron,

thick pamor, distinct step from iron to contrasting pamor material ( this is not evident when a blade is polished),

rotan (rattan) shaped cross section,

rather upright,

penitis/penatas (this is the absolute point) is too small,

distance from final luk to point is long,

gonjo is ugly-rather straight, looks awkward, buntut urang narrow & small,

gandhik is short, low, small, thin,

usually no tikel alis,

very small kembang kacang,

blumbangan not well defined,

odo-odo rarely found,

kruwingen shallow if it exists at all,

wadidang runs on middle line

Madura work is overall very poor work, only the work of Mpu Koso is any good, Mpu Macan was also good, but his production was very small.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This is a summary of a summary, & that initial summary was compiled from my notes for my guidance, more as memory hooks than as a guide book.

The above is the way in which a very highly respected ahli keris in Surakarta during the period from about 1970 through to about 2010 would look at and assess characteristics in order to form an opinion on whether or not a keris blade had been made in Madura. It was not, is not necessary to get a 100% agreement, the opinion is formed upon balance of characteristics. The period I have named is what I know for certain from personal experience, but if we go back to earlier sources we will find similar indicators mentioned.

Historically Bali has had strong ties with Madura, & still does. King Baturengang had the desire of conquest & colonisation, but this did not eventuate, however, from the late 16th century, & seemingly continuing for a very long time thereafter, there were a number of small Balinese incursions into Madura, and there are some small areas of Madura where the inhabitants are of Balinese mixed descent.

It is not at all unusual to find Madura & Javanese keris in Balinese dress. Additionally, Bali had a large part of Lombok under its control for many years, and Balinese keris made in Lombok are virtually impossible to differentiate from Balinese keris made in Bali, keris used in Balinese dress but not made by a Balinese mpu can sometimes be identified, or rather given the probability of having been made in Lombok.

[Gustav]

Yes, I also thought - East Java/Madura.

Unusual in that Madura context for me actually is the Pamor - from what I see from Madura it normally is coarse, broad thick layers, somewhat wild even if well controlled. This one is really minuscule work.

Also Kanyut seems a bit long, but this is likely an older blade.

[A. G. Maisey]

In every keris classification there are variations from maker to maker & from period to period within the life of the same maker, and over a period of time that covers the entire classification, in addition, we do not seek 100% compliance, we seek a dominant presence. It is perhaps taking a note of everything & deciding if a single piece fits within the total population, to do this one must have a lot of background experience.

[Gustav]

Alan, the question then - in which time period in classification Madura could such Pamor have been made?

Something similar regarding finesse I have seen only on Madura Sepuh, with complex Lawe Satukel.

[A. G. Maisey]

Gustav, that question cannot be given an answer that can be supported with any of the banks of knowledge or belief that form a part of the Central Javanese world of the keris.

In fact, it is not really possible with any keris from anywhere to provide an opinion on age based only upon the pamor element in a blade.

The main source of pamor material for Jawa/Bali, was Luwu, and material from Luwu was a trade commodity from about the 14th century.

The foundation of all pattern welding, not only in SE Asia, but in other places across the world, was the necessity to remove impurities from iron before it could be turned into material that was adequate for use in weapons and some tools.

One of the earliest techniques used in this purification process was to begin with a stack of irons, forge weld it & then run it through a process of twisting & welding until the material demonstrated evidence that it was clean enough for purpose. This twisting & welding produced patterns which over time were developed into an art & became proof of quality for the buyer.

The early examples of this were the Merovingian blades, but they used relatively thicker material & fewer bars than the later Viking examples, this was 5th -8th century in what is now France, Germany, Belgium.

This same process of welding & twisting for reasons of material integrity occurred later in Jawa, and for the same reasons, & with a similar result. Over time the various patterns produced by the process developed into an art, the patterns became entrenched as motifs, the motifs gained talismanic intent & belief.

The "twisted bar" type patterns were one of the earliest that smiths developed for producing clean material, & in all honesty a twisted bar pattern is not at all difficult to produce, provided the forge techniques are understood.

So, we might find a twisted bar motif in a very early piece of work, but when the manipulation of the twisted bar has been carried out to produce a particular complex pattern, well, then we are very probably looking at a much later piece of work.

In Jawa these complex pattern welded motifs appeared to begin to be produced when Javanese smiths began to use improved forge technology imported from the Indian sub-continent & notably from Europe.

But it is not just a matter of the overall progression of technology & technique. It takes time for any smith to become a master of his trade, so the early work of any smith might be simple random patterns, but his later work might be master works of the art.

My own early efforts in forge work & pattern welding followed exactly this progression, & I have seen the same course of development with other modern day smiths. I began to learn forge work in the late 1970's, I had stopped intensive work before 1998, the only reason I began to do forge work was to understand better the process of production used in a keris blade. I still do some forge work, & I have taught basic processes to a number of other people, but I never undertook forge work to produce income, it was only ever for the purpose of education.

As we all know, keris blades do not carry the name of the maker, nor the date of manufacture.

A blade made 500 years ago can look as if it has come from the work bench yesterday, if it has had a protected life.

A blade made last week can look as if it is several hundred years old if it has intentionally been made to look so.

To attempt to place a keris blade into a period of time based only upon the type & character of the pamor is totally impossible.

To use the tangguh system to date a blade is perhaps not quite so impossible, but the very name of this system, ie, "tangguh" tells us exactly what the nature of a tangguh classification is:- it is an opinion, and as with any opinion, it is only as good as the knowledge & experience of the person who provides that opinion.

I apologise for this long winded preamble, but I do believe it was probably necessary, not because you, Gustav, do not already have this understanding, but because many people who might read our comments here might not have a similar understanding.

Gustav, to address your question:-

"--- in which time period in classification Madura could such Pamor have been made?"

I cannot give you a supportable answer, & in my opinion, nor can anybody else.

There are several blades shown in this thread, based upon what I believe I can see in the photos, my guesses for two of them, --- post 1 & post 18 --- are 19th century, ie Madura sepuh, the one in post 7 we know to be pre-1674.

[Gustav]

Alan, I asked specifically about Pamor because the execution of it is not very typical for Madura, as I mentioned above, and also the configuration of patterns is not something one sees three times a day. So there is a possibility one has encountered a related blade, especially if he has an experience going long back, and is able to draw conclusions, which possibly allow a more secure placement in a certain time period.

Regarding twisting&welding, probably the first people in Europe who did it, were the celts, already BC, possibly already around 300 BC. At latest around 200 CE Romans could do quite complex pattern welding. There is a possibility it all started in South-East-Europe or Middle East, together with longer swords, which displayed such twisting&welding.

The revival started in the 16th cent. somewhere in Middle East, the earliest known dated yataghan with twisted pattern is from end of 16th cent., around 1600 twisted pattern reached China, and, at the same time or shortly after, what today is Indonesia.

[A. G. Maisey]

Thanks for explaining your reasons for focussing on the pamor Gustav.

When we use twisted bar techniques to produce intentional patterns there is a lot more than just the forge work to consider. The pattern that becomes evident on the finished blade is as much the product of the cold work on the bench, as it is the product of the hot work in the forge.

After the final twisting has been completed, the resultant bar then needs to be forged down into a billet of suitable size to be used to produce a blade, & the blade is forged to shape, but then that forged blade needs cold work to turn it into the form that will be ready for heat treating. As we reduce and smooth the surfaces we cut further & further into that twisted material, and what happens is that as we cut deeper into the twisted the material, the pattern changes.

I’m not at home right now, so I do not have access to books, but I believe that either Sache or Jim Hrisoulas illustrates this effect quite well. I went looking for something on line that would show this, I came up with this:-

https://www.provos.org/p/pattern-welding-explained/

scroll down a bit & there are a couple of short videos that demonstrate this pattern change effect pretty well.

Here is another link to a good article that can assist in understanding how various patterns can be revealed in a twisted bar during the cold work, rather than the hot work:-

http://www.vikingsword.com/serpent.pdf

Bearing this in mind, & being aware that twisted bar patterns have been made a great many times, by a great many smiths, over a great many years, and with those smiths having variable levels of skill, both as individuals & in the same smith over his working life, it becomes obvious that we cannot really use a particular pamor pattern to fix the point in time when it might have been produced.

In respect of the blade in post#1, my immediate impression is that I am looking at Madura post 1980, patterning of this & similar designs is not at all uncommon in recent Madura blades, but when I look more closely at some other characteristics of this blade I am reluctant to place it as late as recent Madura. I’d really need it stripped down & in my hand to provide an opinion that I could defend.

As for having seen a keris blade with similar pamor work to this one, yes, I have seen a great many, but none that could be regarded as particularly old, so if this is an older blade, & for the sake of this discussion I think we can take it as an older blade, then I cannot recall having ever seen a blade with pamor similar to this blade that could be reliably dated to earlier than 19th century. Even in the period up to beginning of WWII, keris with pamor similar to the pamor on the blade in post #1 is scarce.

I estimated this post #1 keris as 19th century, & the reason I did this is because stylistically it is old Madura and most of the old Madura blades that we encounter seem to be 19th century. However, keris makers from our current era & from previous eras, have made blades that were copies of earlier styles. Pauzan Pusposukadgo made quite a number of keris that were copies of earlier Mataram blades, I myself made a copy of an old West Jawa blade.

In respect of the working of iron in the forge to make it usable, that has been a part of producing tools & weapons from iron from the very beginning. However, there is a big difference between the processes used in welding to clean iron in order to make it usable & manipulating and welding iron in order to produce a pre-determined pattern. The cleaning process is simply piling & twisting, & although this does produce a pattern, it is a random pattern not a pattern that has been produced intentionally, nor that can be copied. The work involved in producing a pre-determined pattern requires far greater skill than the skill required to simply produce iron that is adequate for use as a tool or weapon.

As Gustav has commented, patterns in welded iron had been produced in Roman times & before, but the welded blades of the Merovingians were deliberate essays in producing predetermined patterns as an art form, proof of the maker’s competence & an assurance of quality.

There is a lot of conjecture & supposition in archeo metallurgy, but it seems to be generally accepted that forge techniques & technology had advanced sufficiently by the time that the Merovingians rose to power for them to develop true pattern welding as the art that we now recognise. The Merovingians were in fact a continuation of the old Roman Empire, but the area that they controlled was limited (in modern day terms) to Germany, Belgium, some of Switzerland & Austria & most of France. This being so, it is understandable that they built upon the Roman foundation of iron working.

Perhaps we should be careful in using the term “pattern welding”. In my understanding it is a fairly recent term that was first used not long after the end of WWII by an archaeologist, & he appears to have used the term to refer to a sword found in North Germany & dating from about the 3rd century, so, not actually Merovingian, but a couple of hundred years later the rise of the Merovingians began & by about the 7th or 8th century true pattern welding was well established. A pattern in welded ferric material might be apparent in very early work, but is it a true pattern, or is it merely a chance happening generated by the work necessary to produce useable material?

The use of the word “pattern“ infers predictability, an arrangement that can be repeated or copied, so what we refer to as a “random pattern” is a contradiction in terms, simply because it is random.

I’d like to be able to think of, & use, the term ”pattern welding” to mean true, repeatable patterns, not the unpredictable result of a necessary process.

[Gustav]

Alan, thank you for the elaborate response!

I believe the blade from #1 surely is 19th cent. and perhaps could be earlier. The Warangan finish on it is an old one, surely pre-WWII.

Regarding Roman swords and pattern welding - there is a series of books dedicated to Illerup Adal finds. Illerup Adal is a bog in Danemark with spectacular deposit of offerings, and one of the most important sources for well preserved elite Roman spatha. The spatha from the site can be dated around 200 AD, along with 90% of weapon finds.

Pattern welding with twisted rods, often more than two, is among the less complex patterns found there. Others include welding of separate, pre-forged parts, similar to Pamor Poleng, or using braiding. Work of such complexity did appear again only since the second half of 19th cent., true for many things Roman.

Pattern welding with twisted rods did appear even on foot soldiers Gladius and Pugio. The problem is the possibility to recognize the pattern. Illerup Adal is an unique situation, mostly blade surface of Roman, not to speak about earlier swords, doesn't allow to see any traces of it without using X-ray.