Splendour: The Philippe Missillier Collection of Islamic & Indian Arms and Armour

Splendour: The Philippe Missillier Collection of Islamic & Indian Arms and Armour

View full screen - View 1 of Lot 48. An Impressive Steel Elephant Goad (Ankus), South India, early 16th Century.

An Impressive Steel Elephant Goad (Ankus), South India, early 16th Century

UK: Greenford Park Warehouse

Auction Closed

April 29, 12:32 PM GMT

Estimate

8,000 - 12,000 GBP

Lot Details

Description

of typical form, the blades with guarded central ridge, reinforced tips, and emerging from the mouths of sculpted, yali-headed birds that form the goad’s head, supported by sculpted parrots, the cylindrical haft with three bulbous bands, the two-part bulbous pommel with spiral fluting

74.6cm.

Philippe Missillier Collection no.181C

H. Ricketts and P. Missillier, Splendeur des Armes Orientales, Paris: Acte-Expo, 1988, p.76, no.117

Robert Elgood, Hindu Arms and Ritual: Arms and Armour from India 1400–1865, Delft: Eburon Academic Publishers, 2004, p.23

Robert Elgood dates the present elephant goad to the early sixteenth century on the basis of similarities with depictions of spears in the Codex Casanatense, a Portuguese collection of proto-ethnographic watercolours made circa 1540 (Elgood 2004, p.23).