Middle Eastern arms and armour are etymology, not reality

Added: 2026-05-14

[00:00:00]Hello. So, in this video, we're going to go over the second part of Middle Eastern research, which was based on an earlier video I had when I had another YouTube channel, but we'll go into it now, which is dealing with the etymology and reality of talking about Middle Eastern arms and armor and training, basically.

[00:00:17]So, in short, there's a lot of mix-ups and a lot of ethnic designation that's given to a lot of arms and armor that otherwise wouldn't exist.

[00:00:26]So, there's a lot of So, the attribution of this is the ethnic designation of certain words based on etymology.

[00:00:36]So, if there's a saif, it's usually designated as Arabic. If there's a shamshir, it's designated as a you know, Iranian sword. If it's a kilij, it's designated as a uh Turkish sword. Bearing in mind that a lot of these terms are just terms for swords. So, kilij might come from the etymological origin of kilijuri.

[00:01:00]Uh saif means to Oh God, I can't remember the Arabic, but it's um to essentially um render something very fast or to end something very fast, basically. I might be completely wrong about that, but um and shamshir just means a lion's tooth or a lion's claw.

[00:01:21]There are a lot of shamshirs which look like saifs. There are some shamshirs which look like kilijs. There's a lot of There's some kilijs which look like saifs and shamshirs.

[00:01:31]And there's a lot of saifs which look like kilijs and look like shamshirs. The list goes on and on because it's really a matter of etymology and not reality.

[00:01:41]So, why is this the case? How did we get here? And what are the prevailing issues that we need to get over in order to progress with Middle Eastern research?

[00:01:54]So, the answer lies in a lot of Cold War historiography.

[00:01:59]So, would um and this really goes into organizations that have existed and still do exist like Rasamasa.

[00:02:06]Now, I'm not going to get into detail about the organization itself, but the essentially abides, for example, and they focus on Persian, more like Iranian uh more accurately, uh historical martial arts from the Achaemenid period all the way up to the Sassanid period and beyond essentially.

[00:02:29]Um the context of a lot of this kind of ethnic designation takes place in a context of the Cold War or post-war world when the main crux of looking at history was through a national lens.

[00:02:47]And that national lens was subject to kind of the modern territories that you see now in the world. So, it'd be considered the modern territorial area of Iran. If we look at the Turkey, it'd be the modern secular Republic of Turkey.

[00:03:04]Uh if you're looking at, I don't know, Egypt, which might even more because most Arabic countries are Arabic, which have specific local dialects, but um there's more and there's modern standard Arabic as well, but for the longest period of time, a lot of territorial places were based on the authority of certain ruling families, right?

[00:03:26]So, even then that becomes more misconstrued.

[00:03:29]How do you talk about Ottoman era Algeria?

[00:03:33]Or Ottoman era Tunisia or Egypt, right?

[00:03:35]Because they're all either vassalage to the Ottoman Caliph or they are within the de facto territory of the Ottoman Empire itself.

[00:03:44]And if we go to somewhere like the Levant nowadays, where we have very straight lines drawn on a map, it becomes even more problematic.

[00:03:52]And I remember hearing somewhere that a lot of families, a lot of people that otherwise would have interacted with each other when the modern nation-state lines got drawn, it became more difficult, but these people were really indistinguishable in a lot of ways.

[00:04:08]That doesn't mean that there aren't designations of territories, Al-Sham being Syria, etc. But the point is is that when we get into this post-war Cold War consensus about um ethnic and national history, basically, which becomes more entrenched because you get this idea um essentially of the state of affairs prior to being the post uh World War II being not valid anymore.

[00:04:33]And the the impetus of having empires is no longer the case because of the Second World War.

[00:04:40]Um you begin going into all sorts of loopholes that all sorts of holes that you have to jump through in order to justify what you're doing. So, we use an example to do this. So, not only are empires multi-ethnic in nature, um because they're predicated on we call it the core and periphery model.

[00:05:01]I don't think it's necessarily valid anymore.

[00:05:04]But what it predicates itself on is one specific group, whether being religious, ethnic, or in some cases um cultural over other groups of people.

[00:05:17]Um and also the one for territorial expansion basically being one of the other criteria. Not necessarily, so for example, Venice had a relatively small empire and didn't build on expansion once it reached its peak, even though it could have done more.

[00:05:33]And you can build that to a number of excuses, like for example, other territories being as strong.

[00:05:40]Um but the point is is that if we go back to the original point that empires are inherently multi-ethnic in nature and multicultural in nature, with one hegemonic culture ruling over it and trying to assimilate it and transliterate it into the hegemonic culture.

[00:05:58]And we see this. We see this um for example, not actually no no not only does that make it more complicated, but for example, the um people who often did weapons manufacturing in the early modern period for Middle Eastern arms and armor, swords specifically in this case, worked on a cross cross a boundary basis.

[00:06:21]And they were usually located either within the Ottoman Empire or the Safavid Empire and often worked within network that traded both.

[00:06:29]So, it becomes really problematic when we begin putting these national boundaries on uh where they really shouldn't exist.

[00:06:39]And you know, there's a lot of intermingling that otherwise wouldn't have happened and becomes the case even in formal for example, formal Ottoman territories.

[00:06:51]And this is where we get a lot of um transliteration of for example, uh Iranian word Iranian words.

[00:06:59]So, um as well as having for example, the term for a wrestler in the Ottoman Empire um guresh, which if you go to North Africa in Libya or Tunisia, they have gresh or grek, which is a transliteration of that word. You also have the term pakhlavi.

[00:07:20]So, pakhlavi means champion in Iranian, but it was also very common in the uh Ottoman Empire to designate a wrestler as well.

[00:07:30]So, um for example, there's a Greek song that was written I think quite recently, you know, a couple of years back, so it is quite distant, but it's recent in terms of historical um the historical era um pekhlivani the term the name of the song which is talking about a pehlivan so which is a wrestler.

[00:07:56]So it's still archaically used in some context but it do does have some etymological origin in Iranian basically and you know to give context my great uncle was a wrestler in Ottoman era and then British era Cyprus.

[00:08:13]Um I think British era because he wouldn't have lived um he may have lived at the time when the Ottomans transferred control over to the the British but that was his profession he was a wrestler and he was also committed murder which is another story in of itself but um so this is kind of the point that we're getting with Middle Eastern research and the the the detriment of having to apply modern anachronistic interpretations to what we're doing is we often provide we often end up with shortfalls that otherwise wouldn't have existed.

[00:08:49]So a very good example and I use this as well to blur the boundaries between uh the Roman Empire and the medieval period and the Middle Eastern world is that the training seems to be really similar in a lot of cases. So for example drills and exercises but also polo seems to have been really big in the Middle Eastern and Roman world for training uh cavalry or the nobility did it specifically.

[00:09:16]Um and this and also with stuff like mounted archery you know doing the necessary training for that that may have been common in the Safavid period as well as in the Ottoman period as well.

[00:09:33]So to these people you might not necessarily be seeing that much of a difference. Maybe localized indigenous differences.

[00:09:42]Now, with that in mind, we also get the um furosia literature. Now, people like Dr. Khorasani for Erasmus has specifically, and this shows one of the many pitfalls of going by this ethnic or national history that was prevailing during the Cold War that I think he's more familiar with.

[00:10:03]Um you begin only looking at Iranian sources. So, Iranian miniature depictions, poems, um illustrations, you know, historical accounts, etc., but only located within Iran.

[00:10:18]Now, I bought a a while back Dr. Khorasani's book on um Persian sword and Persian armor and sword fighting or whatever it was called.

[00:10:30]And there were no direct instructions in that work on how to uh teach sword and shield fighting.

[00:10:37]Everything he did in terms of the exercises and moves were made up by himself based on what the evidence suggests. So, we're getting into a bit of um reconstructive archaeology or experimental archaeology.

[00:10:53]But, what he doesn't realize is, and anybody who comes from a historian's background such as myself will highlight that um furosia wasn't started out as something that was Arabic.

[00:11:07]So, it was transliterated into Arabic and has Roman, Sasanian, and Turkic origins in terms of different facets of what is being articulated in the text.

[00:11:21]But, the the founder of it, Ibn Akhi Hizam, specifically before they started recruiting uh Turkic ghulams and mamluks, dealt with the Khorasani core.

[00:11:32]He was a commander of it.

[00:11:34]So, in other words, these were Khurasani Iranian cavalrymen who had a lineage going back to the Sasanian period.

[00:11:41]They were notable for exceptionally being exceptionally good heavy cavalry who could diversify and be mounted archers as well.

[00:11:50]And the the change to the ghulams of Mamluks, so the slave classes of Turkish soldiers, was because they were old enough to be um ingrained in the hardy nomad lifestyle, but young enough to be impressionable where they could be indoctrinated essentially. Uh taught the rigors of Islam and then given a first-class training and then mummified on graduation, basically.

[00:12:17]Um So, when you look at it like that and you see these treatises, they weren't only used in the Arab-speaking world, they would have had their lineage and origin in other places as well.

[00:12:32]Even when we get to the Safavid and uh No, the Safavid period specifically, we have um ghulams.

[00:12:42]And they're specifically called ghulams and um they're chosen from specific peoples like Armenians, Caucasians, Georgians, etc. But that is what their function and purpose is.

[00:12:54]So, even up and in we're not even getting into stuff of like when Egypt and North Africa become relatively independent, we see that furusiyya is still being practiced in those parts. The Mamluks were wiped out by Muhammad Ali uh in the 1800s. Um But they they still existed, which shows you that even when it wasn't written down, it was still being taught orally.

[00:13:21]Because the oral part of the tradition and the physical part precedes the written part of the lineage and writing it down. Writing down stuff only becomes a matter when it can be projected enough where it's within the educational strata and consumer demand to make sure that it can be written down, which is why we see a significant uh number of treatises being produced in the late medieval period because Mamluks are getting purged by the administration when the new one comes in and they need to teach new ones as they come in.

[00:13:59]So, they make all these treatises that are apocryphal in nature and are essentially um and are essentially just being mass-produced as much as mass-produced as it poss- as they possibly can.

[00:14:15]So, this is kind of the second part of what why we're talking about that and difficulties. And even this permeates today. There's people who make all sorts of running assumptions uh about things based on ethnic designations and kind of common myths that would have been uh apparent to 20 years ago, which aren't really apparent now.

[00:14:40]So, the biggest example is that a kilij might have a yelman.

[00:14:46]Well, firstly, uh kilij just means a sword, but uh there are kilijs likely that uh don't have yelmans. It really depends on where you are.

[00:14:58]There's shamshirs, which are quite late, which do have yelmans.

[00:15:03]Um there's saifs, um which look a lot like shamshirs, which don't have within the hilt design that kind of bulb that that you see. So, it you begin getting all this kind of mixture, but the the national boundaries we have today are really anachronistic and don't really apply.

[00:15:25]So, this is kind of the the extension to the first part and kind of trying to conceptualize it and make it apparent. And um in order to, you know, make it apparent, and you know, we have to outline this very clearly.

[00:15:41]So, yeah, that's it. So, when you look at stuff and you look at the Middle East, you need to understand that there's a context for everything, but also and and more importantly, things aren't etched in stone the way that I think people would think that they are today.

[00:15:58]And it's no coincidence it's mainly due to ultra-nationalism.

[00:16:02]And places like Turkey, which are exceptionally ultra-nationalist, um tend to wear blinders and blind out parts that aren't relevant and insert parts which and focus on parts which are relevant and insert some parts.

[00:16:18]I mean, a very good example of this is um Suleiman the Magnificent's chief vizier was Rum. So, he was a Greek speaker.

[00:16:26]You know, the Phanariotes, the you know, outsourcing to basically uh you know, part-time militias, all this stuff, you know, the nature of the Janissaries, all of all of this stuff is kind of romanticized and shoehorned in into a specific picture that often national mythos and narratives create. But that doesn't necessarily imply that they're true. And often history is a lot more complicated and it the truth is stranger than fiction.

[00:16:59]And we see this a lot with Balkan history as well. So, you know, the emphasis on Bulgarian history. I mean, for example, you know, during the Komnenian period, um the Bulgars were under Roman occupation essentially and it was Roman territory de de by then. But the reason why rebellions took place initially and then the Bulgars or Bulgarians at the time became independent is because um they wanted a position within the uh they wanted a higher position in conjunction and to get a salary from Constantinople, and Constantinople refused. I don't know for monetary reasons, and then they rebelled. But you're not going to see this within the national mythos of Bulgaria. The reality on the ground is often going to be different.

[00:17:49]So, that's it. This was going to be, I think, a relatively shorter one compared to I'd say longer videos.

[00:17:56]Um but a lot of national mythos muddies the waters, and then it can get even worse when you kind of conceptualize that more on a kind of um larger scale. Uh I'll just say that much.

[00:18:11]But anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this video, and thank you very much.