Pesh-kabz

The pesh-kabz or peshkabz is a type of Perso-Afghan knife designed to penetrate mail armour and other types of armor. The word is also spelled pesh-quabz or pish-ghabz and means "fore-grip" in the Persian language. Originally from Iran, it is now widespread in Central Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and northern India.

Design

All pesh-kabz use a hollow-ground, tempered steel single-edged full-tang blade with a thick spine bearing a "T" cross-section for strength and rigidity. In most examples, a pair of handle scales are fixed to the full-tang grip, which features a hooked butt. The earliest forms of this knife featured a recurved blade, suggestive of its Persian origins, but later examples may be found with both recurved or straight blades. The straight blade is the more common form in South Asia. In all variants the blade is invariably broad at the hilt, but tapers progressively and radically to a needle-like, triangular tip. Upon striking a coat of mail, this reinforced tip spreads the chain link apart, enabling the rest of the blade to penetrate the armor. One knife authority concluded that the pesh-kabz "as a piece of engineering design could hardly be improved upon for the purpose".