What did non curved middle eastern swords look like?

[Garrett Harriman]

BTW, I'm new to the ARMA, and I don't have much knowledge basis to back the previous post up. If anything I have said is blatantly wrong, please do not hesitate to tell me so. I'm here to learn.

[LafayetteCCurtis]

While the correlation between battlefield tactics and preferred weapons of a culture could not be denied, I've always found it interesting that the swords of the era were reminiscent of the holy symbols of the competing powers (the cross for the Christians and the crescent for the Muslims).

There are two problems with this hypothesis. First, on the Muslim side (within the context of the Crusades, that is), only the Turks used curved swords in large numbers. Elsewhere, the Saracens (basically a catch-all term for the Arabs, Kurds, Assyrians,and other ethnicities in Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and indeed much of the Near East in general outside Turkic and Persian principalities) used predominantly straight swords that didn't look all that different from the blades used by the Franks (again, a catch-all term for Western Europeans) except for a tendency towards more cut-oriented forms resembling earlier European Migration Period spathae. The straight "Saracen" swords looked like crosses, too, so the notion that Muslims chose curved swords to avoid the symbolism of the cross rests on pretty shaky grounds for this period.

(Of course, things changed when the Ottomans conquered the entire region in the 15th and 16th centuries, spreading the Turkic/Central Asian fashion of curved swords and masking the diversity of straight blade-forms that existed in the region before their conquest.)

Second, I don't think the crescent was quite established yet as the predominant symbol of Islam in this period. It was beginning to rise in prominence, but at this point it was just one symbol among many--or at least that's the impression I get.

[Kevin Reicks]

While the correlation between battlefield tactics and preferred weapons of a culture could not be denied, I've always found it interesting that the swords of the era were reminiscent of the holy symbols of the competing powers (the cross for the Christians and the crescent for the Muslims).

There are two problems with this hypothesis. First, on the Muslim side (within the context of the Crusades, that is), only the Turks used curved swords in large numbers. Elsewhere, the Saracens (basically a catch-all term for the Arabs, Kurds, Assyrians,and other ethnicities in Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and indeed much of the Near East in general outside Turkic and Persian principalities) used predominantly straight swords that didn't look all that different from the blades used by the Franks (again, a catch-all term for Western Europeans) except for a tendency towards more cut-oriented forms resembling earlier European Migration Period spathae. The straight "Saracen" swords looked like crosses, too, so the notion that Muslims chose curved swords to avoid the symbolism of the cross rests on pretty shaky grounds for this period.

(Of course, things changed when the Ottomans conquered the entire region in the 15th and 16th centuries, spreading the Turkic/Central Asian fashion of curved swords and masking the diversity of straight blade-forms that existed in the region before their conquest.)

Second, I don't think the crescent was quite established yet as the predominant symbol of Islam in this period. It was beginning to rise in prominence, but at this point it was just one symbol among many--or at least that's the impression I get.

Didn't pagan Scandinavians play a part of the creation of a longer cross guards as well? Blades don't always have original cross guards, so dating cross guard to blade might be shaky but is there any pagan Viking artwork depicting them?