Nuer Spears

19. A group of rare spears, early 20th century. Two with horn tips and two with bone.

Tallest is 197cm and the shortest 185cm.

Nuer, Sudan.

 

Evans-Pritchard, writing in 1940, said of this type of spear ‘Till recently they possessed very few iron spears, cherished as heirlooms, but used instead the straightened horns of antelope and buck, ebony wood, and the rib-bones of giraffe, all of which are still used to-day, though almost entirely in dances …’ (E.E. Evans-Pritchard, 1940, The Nuer, p. 86). Howell gives the Nuer term for these spears as giit, while the iron headed spears were known as mur. He states that the giit were regarded ‘with considerable amusement’ by younger Nuer, but that a few were retained as they were ‘considered particularly effective in war, and the Nuer hope they may one day be able to use them … although it required greater skill and strength to inflict a wound with a giit, the wounds once inflicted are more severe’. He goes on to describe the method of hafting them: ‘The giit … is fixed at the joint with an unsewn leather collar made from the tail skin of an ox. This is soaked and stretched round the haft, where it shrinks as it dries’. (P.P. Howell, 1947, “On the Value of Iron Among the Nuer”, Man 47, p. 132-3)

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