The Balustrade of Athena Polias Nikephoros in Pergamon

[MeinPanzer]

Thanks much Ruben!The pics you posted shed some light to the relief from Pergamos.Those round things in the scabard,I asume are rings for hunging, they look odd to me.Imagine the dagger hunging on the right or left side.As the hand reaches the hilt,the edge should have been in the outer side of the blade.Or is this not the case?

I don't think so, necessarily. When you have a curved sword or dagger in a scabbard with at least one straight side, it can be pulled straight out without difficulty. However, with a blade that is curved like this and that lies in a curved scabbard, one would (I think) need to have some extra room in the scabbard so that the handle can be pivoted upwards (we can tell, as you have written, that the side with the rings for hanging is the top side) in order to be able to to take the dagger out of the scabbard. In order to take a curved dagger out of a curved scabbard when the curve is pointing downwards, one would need to pivot the handle towards the direction the blade is curving in order to properly get it out. This is a bit hard to explain, but I hope you understand what I mean.

If, therefore, the scabbard were pointing downwards and not upwards, the owner would have to pivot the handle downwards in order to unsheath it, which would be awkward. As it is shown here, it would be able to be pulled up and out with ease.

What do your coins show?At least one of them shows the scabard alone in the man's side,I think.
Khaire
Giannis

The coins show daggers which are quite different from the ones seen here and on the Pergamon relief. The Istanbul and Pergamon daggers curve gradually right from the base of the blade. They are not sharply curved and the blades are quite slender, and they have clearly delineated handles. The first kind of sickle shown on the Etennan coins has a very wide, very sharply curved (more than 90 degrees) blade; the scabbard shown on the warrior bearing the weapon is too unclear to make out. This first kind of dagger looks like the bottom pruning knife shown in this image, only with a much shorter and thinner grip and a wider and more sharply curved blade:

http://www.andreburgos.com/wineitem/wi559d.jpg

The second kind Sekunda says is scabbarded, but it doesn't look like that to me. This kind is, at any rate, very different from the Istanbul and Pergamon daggers, with a very long, solid handle. It almost looks more like a small, sharply curved falx than a dagger. If they are in fact shown in their scabbards, they have very different kinds of scabbards than the daggers being discussed here have.

PS.You're right about the majority of kopis grips.However there are many,and increasingly into the Hellenistic era,that look like this one,with the handle almost in the middle.

Do you have some examples? I'd be very curious to see them.

I was going to make the same observation as Giannis about the way the blade seems to be hung. Are there no civilian knives from this period with upward curving blades? Skinning blades for example that could be elongated into this blade?

I was thinking of the large sickles you describe on the coinage by the way.

I have no idea, as I know next to nothing about civilian knives, but other Anatolian examples of civilian sickles and those shown on the coins have the cutting edge on the inside of the blade.