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Lot 694
Sword "belida"
Estimated Value:
5.000 € - 8.000 €
Result:
incl. Premium and VAT
Description:
East Indonesia, Solor Islands, Lamaholot, 18th or early 19th cent.L. 81,5 cm
Steel, wood, pewter, bone, horn, leather. A very rare and culturally and historically very important sword from eastern Indonesia, which belongs to the Lamaholot-speaking ethnic groups. The sword from the Solor Islands, called belida, has a distinctive, long, curved handle. In some specimens, the rear part is wrapped in red and black fabric, which is supplemented by appendages made of the same material (this variant is called belapa). This example has a leather or skin cover. The main part of the handle is made of hard, brown wood, which is closed off at the bottom at the transition to the blade by a large, parry-like pinnacle element. This is curved towards the edge on one side and forms a visual counterweight to the large horn and bone extension on one side, which complements the central part of the handle and improves one-handed handling. Pewter - probably due to its almost magical influence on copper, which becomes golden and hard bronze when alloyed - has a great symbolic significance that certainly goes back to the Bronze Age. Pewter as an application was reserved for the nobility and successful warriors. The front-heavy blade is probably a work from south-east Sulawesi, from where blades that were valuable commodities throughout the eastern Indonesian-Malay archipelago (Nusa Tenggara Timur) came for centuries. You can clearly see the laminated construction with a blade body made of striped steel and a forged hard edge.
Collected from an old German private collection since the 1950s
Comparative specimens are very rare; two can be found in: A. G. Van Zonneveld (2002): Traditional Weapons of the Indonesian Archipelago. Koninklijk Instituut Voor Taal Land- en Volkenkunde pp. 33-34; W. Foy (1899): Schwerter von der Celebes-See. Publicationen aus dem Königlichen ethnografischen Museum zu Dresden, page 5, plate 4. The belida is a fighting sword and at the same time an object of prestige, which was used exclusively on the Solor Islands off the coast of Flores in eastern Indonesia, but has relatives on Timor, the Moluccas (Maluku) and Sulawesi. It is likely that it was also common on Flores, where a similar sword ngada, sonri or rugi was common until the 19th century, but was already rare at that time. The term sonri, in turn, is related to the Sanskrit term churiga or churrika (Indonesian surik). This type of sword is many centuries old and goes back to common South Indian models from the early first millennium. It belongs to the klevang group, a generic name for slashing blades in Southeast Asia as a whole. There is also a certain similarity to the palittai in Mentawai. The conceptual and formal similarities suggest that the forms are very old, as there was hardly any contact between these widely separated ethnic groups in historical times. Belida is also related to balato, the traditional sword from Nias in western Indonesia, and beladau on Borneo.
The syllable to (dao) comes from Chinese and means knife or sword (with one edge); in Japanese it became to (sword). The swords were weapons for ritualized warfare with headhunting for the cyclical rededication and renewal of life force and fertility. Despite their (from today's perspective) sinister symbolism and history, they are works of art and today rare cultural and historical treasures.
