Obscure Filipino Weapon that Terrified Enemies - the Panabas

if you're familiar with Filipino weapons particularly those used by the morrows then you'll almost certainly know the barong and the Charis these are really famous but do you know this obscure weapon hi folks Matt Easton here scholar gladiatorius so as mentioned you will probably know the Kerris the big Morrow sword here or indeed the barong both of these were used extensively with or without a shield or alongside other weapons such as Firearms bows and Spears in the morrow uprisings most famously so a lot of these came back to America and Europe at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries however these are weapons that have been in use in the Philippines for quite some time and in fact the Philippines if you're not aware contain an enormous variety of edged weapons they really really love their variety and different cultural groups different tribal groupings had preferences for different types of Philippine weapons now in the future I might compare these two weapons because they were used side by side and some people preferred one and some people preferred the other I have my own preference can you guess which it is but the weapon that we're going to look at in this video isn't one of these because these these are pretty famous and the reason is because this video is in my obscure weapons Series so check out that playlist if you haven't done already and make sure that you have liked and subscribed to get updates of similar videos to this so what is the weapon that we're going to be looking at here well this is a new acquisition so I run an Antiques company is anti-coms and therefore new things are constantly coming through my company which give me obviously good opportunities to make videos about them and this one only came to me the other day I've never had one before and it's also not widely known certainly not as widely known as the Chris the chorus or the barong so what is it well here it is do you know what it is do you know what this weapon is do you know anything about this do you know what it was used for do you know which side The Edge is on so this is called the panabas which is actually a shortened uh phrase which comes from a longer term which basically means a chopping knife or chopping sword and this is one of the weapons alongside the Charis and the barong that was used by the morrows in in that Uprising but equally it was used in the Philippines by all sorts of people for various purposes we'll get to that in a second and you'll notice this is a very different type of weapon to the Charis or the brong those are both distinctively and recognizably large knives or short swords this well this is something quite different isn't it and that's why I thought it fits perfectly in my obscure weapon Series so as I say this is the first one I've ever had I think this is the first one I've ever held I did know what it was and I've seen them in museums in fact you can find examples of this in places such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art the British Museum and you can find them for sale on the antique trade within the antique trade now a lot of people have described this in two rather incorrect ways if you look on the internet and search for panabas you'll find places like Wikipedia and other articles which actually often repeat Wikipedia that's a terrible aspect of modern internet life um that actually repeats some kind of wrong facts and I'm gonna hit you with the two main wrong facts you will read about these the first is that these are a Filipino form of Acts well it's not an ax it has a Tang going into the handle like this and 50 of it is blade yes admittedly it does have a long handle it's got one of the longest hilts available any Filipino weapon other than Spears of course but it is very much not an ax it's not secured to the shaft in a normal ax way with a socket and equally it is a blade above a handle so it doesn't project forward of a handle so I don't think it's right to call it an ax at all in fact it's most similar to something like a Dada or a glaive in other words it's a sword on a stick and admittedly it's not a particularly long shaft but it has more in common with glaves or indeed with barongs than it does with any kind of ax as far as I'm concerned the second thing you'll read on a surprising number of websites which isn't entirely wrong but it which is usually wrong is that it is a forwards curved Cutting Edge in other words that way well this one isn't and neither are most of the others so if you look at the examples in the Metropolitan Museum of Art for example or just if you just Google image search them you will see that the vast majority of panabas are actually edged on this side which makes it even less like an ax of course because a lot of these websites will describe this as a forwards curving blade well it's completely the opposite it's a backwards curving blade okay so it's far more like a saber or a falcon or a glaive than it is anything like an ax okay the The Edge is actually behind the line of access land of line of um kind of striking as it were and uh the moment and essentially it comes back like this and this is completely thick and blunt on the back here and it does have these decorative piercings um and serrations you could call them it's actually completely decorative rather than anything functional probably some kind of status symbol or ceremonial but this side is completely blunt this side I'm not going to run my hand along because it is very much sharp so there we go those are the cup the two main myths that I want to dispel so what is this panabas well it's a very very interesting weapon actually the hilts to it if we if we call it that the grip is actually not that dissimilar in my opinion from a DA from a Burmese da and I suspect that there's actually a relationship here so when we actually look at the history of the da or dab as it's called in some places which you find in Vietnam Thailand Cambodia and so on when you look at the history of that it's actually somewhat obscure we don't know exactly when or where the da originates all we know is that it spreads across the large swathe of Southeast Asia is adopted by lots of cultures and actually if you look at the construction I suspect that this is back in hundreds of years ago probably about the 16th 17th century this is what the da evolved into in the Philippines so in my opinion this is most likened to the DA this is essentially the Filipino da in my opinion right okay if we look at the construction of the handle so we have a thick the blade essentially turns into a Tang there's it enters into the hardwood shaft and this one is very beautifully ribbed spirally gives a fantastic grip and if you look at the cross section you can see that it is ovoid it is not round so absolutely you can index you can feel which direction The Edge is as soon as the thing is in your hand and it can't turn in the hand which is better than most Dar I have to say so I really really like this grip and then the wood continues all the way up to here but shrouded the top part of the wood because that would be prone to splitting in use it is this one is completely sheathed in a brass or at least copper alloy sleeve essentially so that is like a giant ferrule which prevents the metal part of the weapon bursting out of the wooden part of the weapon okay so this is a little bit like a socket on a spear for example or indeed at the top of a DA the construction is very simple similar to lots of da now it should be noted that this particular example which is wood and Brass is not necessarily completely typical in that a lot of them don't have that metallic element they actually do it with rattan so when you look up original examples of these you will find that a lot of them have braided Rattan around here usually around here sometimes down here as well at various intervals so I suspect that the oldest ones actually have Rattan bounding up here to prevent the wood splitting and then later on when perhaps metal was a bit more available they shrouded it to metal this incidentally probably dates the 19th century it could conceivably be from around 1900 1910 because of course the design stayed the same and if you look at the weapons that the morrows were using not this but wrong in those Moro uprisings despite the fact they were fighting the Americans and formerly the Spanish with sort of modern bolt action rifles and so on so forth they were using very traditional weapons in large parts so the weapons they were using in 1900 to 1910 were the same weapons that they would have been using in 1800 or 1810 and that was true of the panabas as well and the panabus as far as we can tell goes all the way back into at least the 18th century probably earlier than that which also adds Credence I think to the idea that it's related to the DA so hardwood grip metal binding at the top essentially a feral to stop it bursting you will notice it is very thick at the back here and just look at that thick thick spine that's around a centimeter thick at the back so it's got a really thick section and the bottom of the blade although it's very obtuse edge geometry is sharp it's sharpened all the way down to here and a very characteristic feature of these is they essentially have a little ricasso here so if you look at lots of them you will see that they will kick out slightly there project outwards and the reason is because for safety reasons that bit is not edged so if your hand were to slide up you're not going to cut your hand there you'll get to a little ledge much like on a cookery or various types of other knife and the edge only starts above that now above that point obviously the edge geometry gets more favorable for cutting so that it is really very sharp and it has distal tapers for those of you who don't know that means essentially that the blade is very thick here let's say about a centimeter it comes down to about eight millimeters then it's down to about five millimeters and then all the way down to about probably 3 millimeters near the tip so it distally tapered this way which gives it a much more Nimble and light feeling in the hand than would immediately appear how it might feel just if it was a flat slab so it has very distinctive distal taper and the blade while it's very broad here is very thin and flat and it does taper to a point and theoretically absolutely these could be used for thrusting in fact this has lost the very tip unfortunately it's been cracked off in years um you could use it for thrusting you could use it for push cutting definitely I think they're predominantly chopping weapons but nevertheless you could thrust with it at a pinch usually these panabus are broader near the tip and sometimes the fancy ones like this have decoration on the back very occasionally they are edged on the inside and the blunt Edge is on this side okay so there are some that are forwards curved that will chop like a like a sickler or side or a cookery but most of them are edged this way notice I'm not hitting my hand now most of them are edged this way and cut more like a saber or a falcon now another important aspect to mention is that weapons made in the Philippines were made of a variety of different available Steels so later period ones were made of whatever steel they could get hold of or trade or loot in some cases so sometimes Trail steel was traded in from places like China or Europe and was used to make barongs and currencies and various other things however traditionally these are made of laminated steel and you can actually see the structure and see how close I can get the blade here you can see the structure and Palmer or essentially pattern welding pattern in the blade which you can get glimpses of here now I haven't I've only cleaned this blade up slightly but if this were to be slightly more cleaned up and Polished up and then re-etched you'd actually see a pattern in this blade so this is essentially a not quite a packable but a laminated Blade with a structure and a pretty pattern in it basically as you would find on many Indonesian Chris for example so now what was this for so we know we can look at the barong and the Currys and we can see basically what they're for you will again read various explanations of what these were for primarily they were weapons but they also seem to have sometimes served a ceremonial purpose and sometimes kind of a tool so the first thing they're not okay is a general purpose garden tool they are not simply for chopping weeds and clearing away through a forest okay they seem to be far more High status than that and a lot more work gone into them they're not just a general Lopper although they could be used for that and I suspect they were sometimes used for that they were sometimes used for chopping meat now that's not as mundane as it sounds because sometimes chopping meat meant sacrificing animals and sacrificing animals had a religious purpose and a cultural purpose unconnected to that so did execution so sometimes you'll see these described as executioners Choppers okay for killing for example prisoners and it does seem they were used for that so clearly something which is good for chopping meat or good for chopping fish will also work for chopping humans and it was put to that purpose they were also used as Weapons either one-handed or two-handed clearly you've got a long enough grip so you could absolutely use this as a two-handed weapon but you can completely comfortably use this as a one-handed weapon either by itself or with some form of Shield that's really quite maneuverable and quite Nimble okay it's kind of the same weight as a tomahawk so absolutely this can be a one-handed weapon or a two-handed weapon yes they were used as Weapons yes they were sometimes carried by tribal Chiefs with a ceremonial purpose a status symbol yes they were sometimes used for executions or sometimes for sacrificial purposes um and all of the above so one of these weapons this particular weapon which is probably late 19th century could have been used for executions could have been used for sacrifice could have been used in war could have been used in the more uprisings all of those things it doesn't have to be any particular one of those what we can say therefore is we let's not call it an executioner sword let's not call it a ceremonial sword let's just call it panabasa okay that's the name of it and they were used for all of these things and one final detail about the panabasas somewhat gruesome one it has to be said and I haven't completely fact checked this but it seems plausible I have read in a couple of places that these were sometimes used by second line troops so the primary land troops might be using Spears with things like barongs or Kerris as their sidearms together with shields shields were extensively used by the morrows as well and they had armor some of the time as well so they would have been probably the front lines and I have read that sometimes because these were such effective Choppers and they were used in executions and ceremonial purposes that sometimes there would be people coming up in the rear lines with these two kill Fallen enemies and that's entirely possible if you're in the type of conflict where you intend to take no prisoners then this is a logical weapon of for dispatching people um in a similar way we know hatchets were used in the Hundred Years War by English soldiers against wounded French for example in the Hundred Years War so within that context although I've argued this is not an ax it does perhaps fulfill some of the same purposes as an ax when it comes to fighting and execution and things like this here we go the panel panabas I hope that has been occasional to some of you even if you knew that this was a panabas maybe you didn't know all of the things let me know down in the comments did you know that this was a panabas have you ever heard of a panabas do you know anything more about Panama that I haven't mentioned in this video um and can you recommend any other things I can go to research and look at because I think it's an absolutely fascinating weapon what a great thing to have in my hands thank you again for watching thank you to my uh patrons incidentally who make this channel possible please make sure that you've given me a like please make sure you've subscribed and hopefully you'll be around to find out about the next obscure weapon in my obscure weapons playlist thanks for watching and see you soon cheers folks thanks for watching we've got extra videos on patreon please give our Facebook a like And subscribe if you haven't already cheers folks

Channel: scholagladiatoria

Views: 55,415

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Id: qLuY0zcTbFs

Length: 17min 42sec (1062 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 11 2023