The saif (), sometimes called a shamshir (from ), depending on the era, originated in Arabia before the 7th century. Little is known about this weapon besides what Al-Kindi wrote in his treatise On Swords in the 9th century.
Description
In the article "Introduction to the Study of Islamic Arms and Armour", A. Rahman Zaky says the saif is "an Arab sword, with a rather broad blade and sometimes with a peculiarly hooked pommel. The size varies greatly. It is found in most countries in which the Arabs have lived, and each has its own variety. Early Arab chroniclers used to mention two kinds of swords:
Saif Anith, which was made of iron, and
Saif Fulath or
Muzakka, which was made of steel."
[Zaky 1961, p. 21.]
Etymology
Saif is an Arab word for swords in general, not a certain type. The term
xiphos, Greek for a double-edged straight sword, may be related to
saif.
Anatomy
The handle is the
miqbad; the pommel,
halq; and the quillon,
haris. The blade is composed of the false edge and the true edge, which are known as the
zafiya or
hafat zafiya and the
haqiqia, respectively. The sword's point is referred to as the
nuqtat.
Some Arab swords may contain a fuller, which is called an
'akmal, but others do not. Therefore the area where the fuller would be is completely flat.
History
The production of the Arab sword has four distinct periods: Pre-Islamic (ancient swords before the 7th century), Early Islamic (old swords 7th to 8th centuries), Islamic Golden Age (swords of the 9th to early-13th centuries) and the Abandonment (late swords of the late-13th to 16th centuries). Most information on Arab swords come from literature.
Pre-Islamic
Prior to the rise of Islam in the 630s, the settled communities in the Arabian peninsula developed into distinctive civilizations, and are limited to archaeological evidence. Accounts written outside of Arabia and Arab oral traditions were later recorded by Islamic scholars. Among the most prominent civilizations were the
Dilmun which arose around the end of the fourth millennium BC and lasted to about 600 AD and the
Thamud which arose around 3000 BC and lasted to about 300 AD. Additionally, from the beginning of the first millennium BC, Southern Arabia was the home to a number of kingdoms such as the
Sabaeans and the coastal areas of Eastern Arabia were controlled by the Iranian
Parthia and
Sassanians from 300BC. The Arabs of the peninsula, thus, had their own local system of warfare, that was not of big armies, but of small battles and skirmishes among tribes.
[Zaky 1965, p. 107.]
Early Islamic
Swords in Mu'tah, called
Mashrafiya swords, were so highly regarded, that
Muhammad ordered in 629 a raid on the city to capture them.
[Alexander 2001, p. 200.] In the case of other captured weapons we can be less sure about where they were produced. This is true of the weapons taken from the Jewish tribe known as the
Banu Qaynuqa. In his
sira Muhammad's biographer
Ibn Ishaq, recounts that during Muhammad's life-time this tribe was noted as arms manufacturers, or as possessing large stocks of arms in Medina; it is possible that some of their arms were produced there.
[Alexander 2001, p. 200.]
Islamic Golden Age
By the years of the Islamic golden age, the
Sabre and double-edged swords of the Middle East co-existed.
Abandonment
In the later years of the Arab sword, of the seven listed places by Al-Kindi where it was manufactured, four remained by the later half of the 13th century. With Khorasan and Damascus razed by the
Mongols and
Byzantium conquered by the Crusaders in the
Fourth Crusade, the Arab sword took a strong decline. Its final end came in the 16th century, when the
Ottoman Empire seized Egypt in 1517 and Yemen in 1552–60 with the
scimitar, the
shamshir, and the
kilij, thus marking the end of the Arab sword. Neither the Mongols, Crusaders nor Ottomans had shown an interest in the Arab sword. These groups had their own traditions, and thus displaced it. The last two places,
Sri Lanka and
Kedah, had slowly grown influenced by neighboring traditions and thus ceased to make it altogether.
In c. 1350, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya wrote a treatise on Arab arms called "Furusiyya".[ed. Nizam al-Din al-Fatih, Madinah al Munawara: Maktaba Dar al-Turath, 1990.] In this text, he proclaims that aside from horsemanship, lance, and archery, swordsmanship was a fourth discipline of Furusiyya.
Manufacturing
Al-Kindi lists seven places from which Arab swords were forged. Starting with the best;
Yemen, Khorasan,
Damascus,
Egypt, Rum (meaning
Byzantium),
Sri Lanka and Qalah (possibly
Kedah).
Use
During the early Islamic years, the Arabs sheathed their weapons in
. The use of sword and baldric was consciously abandoned by the Abbasid caliph
al-Mutawakkil (847–861) in favor of the saber and belt. But the use of sword and baldric seems to have retained a ceremonial and religious significance. For example, the
Zangid ruler Nur ad-Din (1146–74) was anxious to demonstrate that he was a pious traditionalist, searching out the old methods preferred by Muhammad. Consequently, among his reforms he re-adopted the custom of wearing a sword suspended from a baldric. His successor
Saladin (1138–1193), known in the west as Saladin, did the same and it is noteworthy that he was buried with his sword, "he took it with him to Paradise."
[Alexander 2001, pp. 204–205.]
According to David Nicolle, the Arab sword was used mainly for cutting.[Nicolle 1994, pp. 13–14.] He cites Usama ibn Munqidh's memoir as evidence, that when Usama was being attacked by a Hashshashin, Usama struck the assassin down.[Cobb 2008, p. 129.] Other stories by Usama add credence to David Nicolle's theory.
During the Mamluk period the saber seems to have been the preferred weapon of the warrior elite but the most finely decorated edged weapons were swords. Swords were used in the most important ceremonial events in the Mamluk period, that is, in the investiture of Mamluk sultans and caliphs of the restored Abbasid dynasty where the ruler was "girded" with the "Bedouin sword" saif badawi. There are no surviving descriptions of such swords but it can be suggested as a hypothesis that the exquisitely decorated Mamluk sword blades now preserved in Istanbul are in fact saif badawi.[Alexander 2001, pp. 204–205.]
Bibliography
-
-
-
-
-
-
http://gladius.revistas.csic.es/index.php/gladius/article/viewFile/191/193
-
http://gladius.revistas.csic.es/index.php/gladius/article/viewFile/211/213
External links
