Luristan Swords

IMAS 5

Note: The “Lurtistn Sword” paged will be formatted somewhat differently (simpler) than the rest. As I grew older, my eyes deteriorated to a point where I can just barely type stuff in my html editor. I apologize for typos and perfectly spelled but wrong words produced by the erroe correction without me noticing.

My internal notes after buying the sword

Details

A Key to Crimping

One animal is missing; fell out of its crimp plate. This gives us a clear look at the crimping plate still left on the bulk of the hilt. If you look closely, you see a thin black line running around in the interior; a magnified view is below.
That might give an idea how the assembly was mad.
First, the smith makes what I like to call a crimping ring. The sketch below gives an idea of what I mean. The underside of the ring is then fire-welded to the bulk and the “black lines” in the picture denote the inside of the crimping ring.


Schemartic drawing of the crimping ring


Enlargement of above. The faint black line denotes the edge of the crimping ring

Next you put the anal (or head) inside the ring, do the crimping, and then fier-weld the crimps to the inset. Next you do some smoothing and some carving (e.g. the animal legs). Far more to that in IMAS 1. The animal sits on the bottom of the crimp ring and that’s why we often find that there is free space below the animals in X-rays or cuttings.
Rather tricky but if you think about it, the only way. Chiseling out the crimps from a solid bulk and then inserting the animal would be far more difficult if not impossible., The heads show some signs of attachment via a crimp plate, too.

The two bands were done with a crimping technique, too. This can be clearly seen in the picture.

The underside of the pommel plate has no decorations.


Remains of the band

The blade is heavily corroded with no particular remarkable feature on the corrosion pattern. There are hints of a layered structure but it is not conclusive.

With frame