HI,
I have never seen this weapon before, i found it on the post about the Frazier Arms Museum and it looks very interesting. This really piques my curiosity, so I was wondering if anyone could identify it, give me some background info, maybe its origin and history?
Just curious.........thanks
-James

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That's an Indian Katar. It's a push-knife, basically. Beautiful piece.

The Katar usually has the tip, the last 5th of the blade or so thickend so that it will pierce the maille of maille and plate armour better. The two parallel bars in the middle are gripped by the hand so these are held basically perpendicular to how one would grip a regular knife. Sometimes called "punch daggers" there are three interesting sub members of the family. In one the blade is larger than most and the twin grip bars slide controlling a spring. When gripped tight this causes the large blade which is actually two halves to spread open revealing a smaller blade inside. The misconception is that this was meant to be done in the victim causing a bad wound but was actually used for parring. The second group again has a large blade but has a smaller katar inside. In effect the larger is a sheath for the smaller. The third are VERY large and have a big basket guard around the grip(these are sometimes known as hooded katars) for protection when parrying. I believe the last sort were commonly used in northern India.

No the pata is a gauntlet sword and the gaurd is over the hand the hooded katar is a katar with a large gaurd under the hand like a very large broad D-gaurd.

Can someone tell what this is? A pata with a shield?

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Wolfgang , that certainly is a new one on me. Where'd you find it?

Stone's Guide depicts all three types of katar as well as swords using this type of grip(open not enclosed like a pata). Both stones and swords and Hilt Weapons show a type i'd forgotten about in which there are two narrow blades side by side.

The Russian weapon is called a tarch'. You can read some about it here: http://www.xenophon-mil.org/rushistory/mediev....htm#Tarch

What book did you yank those pictures from?

Those are hooded katars and from the few manuscript pics i've ever seen the gaurd was under hand like a knuklebow rather than over the top like the guard of a pata/gauntlet sword. I'm not sure why this would be so and perhaps it is the same "take it with a grain of salt" that one often has to do with European manuscript illustrations its just the only way i've seen them held thus the "hood" under the hand.

Hooded katars come over your hand... there are a few extremely beautiful hods out there, it would be a crime to hide those... When I'll get home, I'll post a few pictures.

BTW, pata is the gauntlet sword (75-90cm blade), tooroom is the same in dagger-size. There is no difference in name with other katars, even as there are some with 10cm blades and some with 90cm blades. Some katars in the 16-18th century (especially southern ones) were made from broken blades, preferably european ones, which is thought to be a reason of the more slender blades.