Судан и Большой Ближний Восток

255 Alexander S. Matveev. A Case of Survival of an Early Medieval Straight Sword... tioned that these swords were also “used in the Sudan”, he might have intended to demonstrate a specimen of a better quality and a more illustrative example of this type of swords out of those available in Britain, without mentioning that this item came from Sudan. Alter- natively, this piece of weaponry could indeed come from Chad, but in this case this sword had been initially brought to the Bagrimi territory from Darfur. We know that ‘Ali Dinar made to produce a number of such luxury weapons not only for his personal use, but as gifts to the local tribal chiefs, high British officials or neigbouring rulers. As such it may come to Bagrimi territory as a gift, e. g., to one of its rulers, perhaps, even to Rabih al-Zubayr (or one of his lieutenants) who till his death in 1900 controlled a part of former Bagrimi kingdom; though this remains merely speculations. In any case, the main trade route linked Bagirmi with outside world in the first quarter of the 20th C. went to Khartoum via Darfur, thus making it possible for the Sudanese blades to be brought there. Thus, finally, we can state that the term “ kaskara ” introduced by Stone, is not based on any local realities, being rather a result of some misunderstanding—unlike the term takouba which is a real local name of other, western Sahara type of straight sword. Nevertheless, since the word kaskara became widely used in the West, both among collectors and in the scholarly literature, it makes sense to keep it as a conventional term to denote a specific type of the Sudanese straight double-edged sword — though keeping in mind that it is merely a convention. Fig. 16. Takouba