A Note on the Significance of the Technique of ‘Casting On’ as Applied to a Group of Daggers from North-West Persia

Extract

In 1962 the authors published a photograph of a dagger from Iran (of unknown provenance) in the United States National Museum, Smithsonian Institution, at the same time pointing out that this was an example of the application of the technique of ‘casting on’. Since then we have received a radiograph of this dagger, kindly taken by the United States Naval Ordnance Laboratory, and this clearly shows the junction between the tang of the blade and the cast-on hilt. (Plate XII, 1, 2 and Fig. 1, 7.)

The technique of casting on can be fairly simply explained by reference to this particular dagger. The blade and tang were first cast and the casting was then trimmed, hammered and polished. Subsequently a mould was prepared around the upper part of the blade and the tang, into which was poured the molten metal which would provide the handle of the dagger. After this second mould had been removed the handle would then be trimmed and polished. Had the work been carried out with very great care indeed there would be complete metallic bonding between the blade and handle, but in practice this is very difficult to achieve and there is almost inevitably some oxidation of the blade and tang with the result that a thin film of metallic oxide separates the two parts. Although technically a weakness, from our point of view this is fortunate since the oxide being less dense to X-rays it allows us to see the line of junction very clearly.