This one kinda escapes me..... Horn & Aluminum sheath Steel blade , sharp , but has too much movement to have been hardened. The handle is a mix of horn, bone, metal...& other thingys... The knife is 10 1/2 inches....tip to toe. That scratching on the front....is a mountain...river...small boat with sails and hidden from view ...is what looks like a coconut palm......
Looks like a volcano instead of a mountain. What is the blade thickness,did you try a file on the blade edge? 2.5mm non heat treated steel has very little flex.
that's because there's a chip there....making it look like it's spewing ash... The whole sheath has been beat to hell and back ! The blade is just a hair..over 1 mm thick...it's entire length....and there are grinder ...or file marks covering both sides completely. I did not see if a file will skate over it....but I doubt it.
My guess is Philippines, based on the combination of Moorish style inlay and 'tribal' style head. The horn looks like buffalo horn, which is also Asian.
I think the horn sheath has been worked on by dermestid beetles. Is that a hex nut holding the handle onto the tang?
I think the clip point style of the blade is unusual for an Asian/Oceanic knife. And most of the ethnographic blades I have seen are ground on both edges - not beveled on one side and flat on the other. I am beginning to suspect it may be someone's shop project. (My partner says it looks like a tiki god coughed up a ka-bar.)
It reminds me a lot of a souvenir knife I got in the Middle East, around 1960. Mine has horn handles, inlaid dot decoration, bone spacers; brass and base-metal fittings; metal-covered wood sheath. It doesn't adhere to any particular ethnic tradition or blade shape, and is notable in that the blade is not sharp, and would take a great deal of work to make it an actual usable knife. Often in that kind of situation, the distinction between commercially made and shop project is pretty small; the commercial makers of such knives are working by hand, in small shops, not factories where there would be any sort of consistency.
