CAUCASUS, 19TH CENTURY

According to Oliver Pinchot, elaborately decorated daggers such as ours originate from Daghestan where the demand for weapons would have flared after the arrival of the Russian administration. He argues that the newly arrived soldiers and civil servants developed a taste for the local weapons. The created demand was met by the smiths who incorporated western and Ottoman designs onto local forms resulting in a mass output of mostly edged weapons running parallel to a more traditional production. In referencing a dagger with figural decoration closely related to ours, Pinchot further suggests that this mass production fuelled iconographic invention (Oliver S. Pinchot, Arms of the Paladins: the Richard R. Wagner Jr. Collection of fine Eastern weapons, Rhode Island, 2014, p.33). The published kinjal and its sheath are fashioned in silver-applique with mythical beasts and a snake coiled around a tree of life (Pinchot, 2014, ill.3.35).