Two Salawar yataghans - khyber knives

[Jeff Pringle]

At an auction last year, one of these caused a bit of a stir. It had a metal hilt with fairly intact original koftgari, and a blade (that looked to me to be) of high-quality wootz although that was not called out in the description or immediately obvious in the hand, the blade having been cleaned up with abrasives but not re-etched. Unfortunately, the blade was afflicted with not just spots of rust, but craters that went half-way through the blade in places.
Despite those blemishes, bidding in the room quickly took it up to somewhere between 2 and 3 thousand dollars, and then continued between two telephone bidders all the way to 7 K. So there was a nice, long stretch where everyone in the room was out of the game and could only watch, with ever increasing awe & incredulity as the price climbed and the bidding rhythm slowed, until the hammer finally fell and they could get on with their auction.
There was one of those ‘collective sighs of relief’ moments when one of the two bidders finally gave up.
Nice knife!