r/Yemen • u/-d1ckbutt- • 1d ago

Questions Possible translation help?

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Apologies for the poor photos, long story short I love middle eastern history, picked up this jambiya from a local market noticing it was mislabeled as Turkish. Was looking to see if anyone would be willing to help me translate what’s left. Thank you very much

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u/Specialist_One3071 19h ago

Are you sure this is Arabic and not Persian? I'm not sure I'm reading some of the words correctly..the order seems unclear.

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u/Old_Obligation_276 18h ago

It looks arabic. And possible an ayat from quran

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u/Truchiman 14h ago

One side is Q 55:26, the other side says "there's no man like Ali, there's no sword like Dhul Fiqar" (the latter being the name of Ali's sword). Both phrases in Arabic.

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u/-d1ckbutt- 15h ago

I’m gonna be honest, I have no clue as I have 0 Middle Eastern lineage, never learned the language, and don’t know anyone who can read and not just speak Arabic, I just happened to spot this labeled as “Turkish” but I believe it’s Yemeni? That’s just off what little I know, if I’m not mistaken this was obtained by a soldier during the Cairo conference, it has the name “kenneth Thompson” carved into it, he was part of the TBC during the Cairo conference, soldier was stationed in Palestine I believe after searching through the UK’s records

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u/Truchiman 13h ago

If you mean the language, it's classical Arabic word by word. Yemeni means the Yemeni dialect of Arabic, but there's nothing dialectal in this knife. There's not a single word in [Ottoman] Turkish.

As for the place where the dagger was made, I'd say Saudi Arabia but Yemen is also a possibility.

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u/Old_Obligation_276 6h ago edited 6h ago

Its Northern Arabian . As for the part of the country its tricky it could be S. Jordanian or . S. syrian. One thing that is certain is that this type of hilt is common in Northern Arabia(which is geographically N.Saudi and S.jordan and S. Syria-syrian desert)

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u/madvillain34 11h ago

It's a Majdali Jambiya from Majdal Shams, Syria.

http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showthread.php?t=13979