ANCIENT Indian Weapons (B.C.)

[Steven C.]

Eh.. how is it an urumi if it's not flexible? And when did the flexible urumi appear?

Also people, please I need more help than that..

[ALEX]

Steven,
My comment was based purely on shape similarities. I just do not know much about these weapons. Hopefully someone else who does will post.

[Jim McDougall]

Hi Steven,
Most of the weapons discussed here are more focused on those actually available to collectors, and examples of historical periods relatively recent compared to that of your project. Many of the references we often refer to will have some basic information pertaining to ancient weapons such as,
"Indian Arms and Armour" G.N.Pant ; "The Indian Sword" P. Rawson ; "The Glossary of the Construction, Decoration and Use of Arms and Armor" , Stone and certainly a few others. Most of these are often somewhat difficult to obtain and can be expensive so for your purposes possibly interlibrary loan would be best.
Also, while often somewhat elementary in detail on weaponry, the Osprey series such as "Man at Arms" can often be most helpful in establishing good overview in study of historical periods and the armies of the times. There are excellent titles among them that describe and colorfully illustrate many ancient armies including India, Persia and so on. These can be found online and are quite reasonable as they are paperback monographs.

An excellent source for specific questions once you have established certain weapon forms and timeframe would be the arms and armor department at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. As far as the martial arts application pertaining to weapons, the historical data in these would be best found in organizations specific to those disciplines.

Your project sounds intriguing and hopefully these ideas might be of some help. I wish I could offer more detail on the weapons themselves, but the topic is quite broad and most data available is as Alex has noted, mostly applied typologically and from iconographic sources.

Best wishes and good luck on your project,
Jim

[Joe]

These may be akin to what you're looking for, but I don't think that they're quite as ancient as you want.

[Jim McDougall]

Those are great Joe!!! Can you say a little on what these are and where you found them. They are pretty interesting examples and I'd like to follow up on them as well.
Thanks for posting them,
All best regards,
Jim

[Joe]

Thanks Jim. These two came from Hermann Historia, where they were advertised as being ancient Central Indian two-handers, if I recall correctly.

Unfortunately, I don't know which auction number they were listed in, so I'm having a tough time finding the original listing...

[Jim McDougall]

Thank you for checking that Joe. It seems Hermann Historica does often have great pieces in thier catalogs, and lot of good photos. I only received the flyers which were of course understandably brief in descriptions given the limited space.
I found weapons of this type listed in Stone (p.643) as two handed swords used by Rajputs and Mahrattas, and it is noted that the hollow shafts of the hilts often encased small knives. While the hilts on these examples seem to have disc type elements spaced on the long grips, the example shown in Stone features the fluted brass orbs often seen on them.

It seems these are directly associated with similar two hand weapons with spaced guards from the south and termed 'mel puttah bemoh' (Stone p.444, Egerton 134) with long rapier blades and noted to be from 18th century.

These are very interesting and unusual weapons that seem to have influenced the two hand swords of the Naga in Assam, and illustrate the wide diffusion on weaponry on the Subcontinent. They are however indeed far from the period Steven has inquired on.

All the best,
Jim