Iranian Martial Arts

[Thearos]

I think Indian Martial arts regularly recur on this forum; here's a link to the work of an iranian scholar who works on "Iranian Martial Arts"

http://www.kavehfarrokh.com/military-hi ... tial-arts/


His works on "Iranian arms from Bronze Age to Qajar" is typically of the "eternal iran" school of nationalism, though might be v. interesting for all that. I assume the martial arts he talks about are mainly C17th-18th stuff.

[Lyceum]

Ugh...have commented on this before (nationalism etc). Still, I ask, what are his sources?

[admin]

Manouchehr used to be a big contributor over at swordforum, I don't know if he still is but I suspect so.

[Cutlery Penguin]

Nice to see he's still around.

[Thearos]

Is there a general Indo-Iranian zone of martial culture, just like linguistically ?

[Lyceum]

Is there a general Indo-Iranian zone of martial culture, just like linguistically ?

Probably not more in a general sense, even the linguistic sense is useless after late antiquity. Despite the protests of people like the above it really is quite apparent that turkic/arabic/mongolic influences really become all pervasion after a while.

Incidentally in the NorthW IA dialects to fight like a turuka (=Persian) basically means to take it up the arse/not do it well etc.

Naturally there are going to be common elements, due to proximity, but that is going to be as due to the Mongolians etc as anything else.

[admin]

http://www.swordforum.com/forums/showth ... ts-of-Iran

[Sean M]

I will be interested to learn about his sources ... I think its less manuals than other genres of literature which deal with combat and combat training. His book on arms was good but seemed a bit overwhelmed by the number and diversity of his sources ... a lot of sections read as summaries or syntheses of other writers. He reads a formidable number of language fluently, and he has a long martial arts background, so hopefully he can turn out something interesting.