1750€
Mindan dha
Overall length
Sheathed 86,5 cm
Blade length
61 cm / thickness 8 mm
Materials
Iron, steel, wood, silver, white metal, brass
Dating
Mindan village, Burma, presented day Myanmar
Provenance
Spanish art market
Burma, late 19th century
Presented is a nice Mindan dha sword from the late 19th century.
Both hilt and sword are decorated with mythical illustrations and text. Similar to a comic book. In our example these illustrations are based on a famous play "Ti Lat Poe Oo" from Burmese opera that was popular around 1910 . The story is about a thief called "Ti Lat" or "Bo Ti Lat", follower of the famous legendary thief "Nga Tat Pyar"of Ava. After retirement of his master Nga Tat Pyar, Ti Lat was married to Ma Poe Oo and settled in a rural place as farmer. For he was not as skillful and talent as his master, he can't continue his thief business. But he was always looking for a chance to revive his former profession.
One day, he had a dream. In his dream, the Deity Oo Min Kyaw tell him to go and wait at the bank of a creek near the village. He was waited by the creek as his dream says. A few days later, a crocodile came with a bronze manuscript biting in its mouth. Bo Ti Lat managed to get the bronze manuscript from crocodile's mouth.The manuscript says " the one who roast and eat a baby taking out from a pregnant woman's womb can get the power of Invisibility". He was impressed and decided to do as it says so that he can be an invisible man and restart his former thief job efficiently.Lucky for him, his wife Ma Poe Oo was pregnant and will give birth soon. So he cut his wife's womb open, took the baby and roasted it. When the villagers know about it, they tried to catch him but he ran off into the forest and hide. Local people reported to governor, so the governor sent an army squad to search and arrest Bo Ti Lat. After his capture, Bo Ti Lat was convicted for murder and executed. Later, people believed that he become a deity and enlisted him as one of the 37 Deities of Nyeung Yen.
For the righ side of the sword, from top to bottom, #1 ~ သူခိုးကြီးဘိုထိလပ်ဇပ်ခန်း (သူခိုးကြီးဘိုထိလပ်ဇာတ်ခန်း) means " The story of Great Thief Bo Ti Lat " . #2 ~ မောင်မင်းကျော်နပ် ဘိုထိလပ်ဆေးကျိန်ပေးပုံ (မောင်မင်းကျော်နတ် ဘိုထိလပ်ဆေးကြိမ်ပေးပုံ) means " Illustration of The Deity Maung Min Kyaw is giving a magic cane to Bo Ti Lat ". #3 ~ ဘိုထိလပ် မိဂြောင်းပဇပ်ကြီးပုလူဘိုက်လုပုံ (ဘိုထိလပ်မိကျောင်းပါးစပ် ကြေးပုရပိုဒ်လုပုံ) means " Illustration of Bo Ti Lat is grabbing the bronze manuscript from a crocodile's mouth". #4 ~ ဦးမင်းကျော်နပ် ဘိုထိလပ်ကြီးပုလူဘိုက်ရ၍မူပျောပုံ (ဦးမင်းကျော်နတ် ဘိုထိလပ်ကြေးပုရပိုဒ်ရ၍မူပြောပုံ) means " Illustration of The Deity Oo Min Kyaw telling the meaning of bronze manuscript that Bo Ti Lat have got “.
For this left side, from top to bottom, #1 ~ သူခိုးကြီးဘိုထိလပ်ဇပ် (သူခိုးကြီးဘိုထိလပ်ဇာတ်) means " The story of Great Thief Bo Ti Lat " . #2 ~ ဘိုထိလပ်မပိုးအူရင်ခွဲ၍သားငယ်ယူပုံ means. " Illustration of Bo Ti Lat cut Ma Poe Oo's womb open and take out the baby ". #3 ~ မောင်ညိုကမပိုးအူသေကြောင်းပျောပုံ (မောင်ညိုကမပိုးအူသေကြောင်းပြောပုံ) means " Illustration of Maung Nyo is telling that Ma Poe Oo's dead ". #4 ~ ဘိုထိလပ် တပ်နှင့်ဝိုင်း၍ထွက်ပျေးပုံ (ဘိုထိလပ် တပ်နှင့်ဝိုင်း၍ထွက်ပြေးပုံ) means " Illustration of Bo Ti Lat is fleeing away for being surrounded by an army “.
The blades edge still remains sharp. The scabbard consists of silver bands, each separated with brass wire work and a thick niello background. It is probably not made in Mindan.
Condition is very good. Old restoration on the pommel piece. It was soldered back onto to the shaft.
Price:
1750€
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