Featured A bronze spear head for your perusal.

Can’t tell if it is northern Asian or southern Asian. Looks like the chap has a curly beard so possibly a Mughal ruler as I picked up a bunch of painted terracotta Mughal heads in another lot that I’ll put in another thread later. The bit that fixes to the shaft is broken and it has damage so don’t know if it is ceremonial or usable etc. but there seems to be some age to it. Can anybody shed some light on it???

Data
Blade 26.5cm long / 11cm max wide
45cm total length
3.7Kg

Cheers
Stephen

 

Love it, Stephen.
Your Mughal ruler is a lion's head, with snakes coming out of its mouth, along the spearhead.
It is probably Indian, but from one of the Indian-ruled kingdoms, so not Mughal. I think it was ceremonial. The shape reminds me of a kila or phurba, a ritual dagger used in Tantric and Buddhist ceremonies.

 

The animal head looks similar to a Burmese chinthe -


It also looks like there is some sort of glyph/writing on the top (bottom?) of the head, which might be a clue to origin.

 

Yes, it looks like some kind of Devanagari script symbol. Since Devenagari script is used in different versions from India to Indonesia, and symbols derived from it are even more difficult to figure out, it isn't something we will ever find out about.
The best way is to find a similar object, and Burmese is a good start.

 

Ya, the blade point to Phurba..........but ??

 

But it is much bigger.
Still could be ritual or ceremonial though.

 

Certainly seems to fit the kila or phurba style but way too heavy for a dagger and has pin holes for a spear shaft. That symbol on the back is very interesting.

 

I am becoming convinced that this is a phurba/kila, even if exceptionally large. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find a direct comparison - just illustrations and partial similarities with broken links.
The example on the left in this illustration shows the knot forms often placed at both ends of the handle of a phurba, and the fluted cone similar to the connecting piece of the op's:

https://dorjeshudgen.wordpress.com/2017/06/28/phurbakila-or-kilaya/

This one shows a similar chinthe at the top of the blade, but the link to the original source is broken (it showed up in an image search for "Nepalese phurba kila"):


(Sorry, the first attempt to get this image to appear failed. I think this item is somehow cursed.)

 

Couple of developments. First a powerful magnet just sticks to it and it looks like a few spots that have a rusty appearance so not quite sure what to make of the composition. Second - after cleaning out the mud from a wasps nest I realised there was a nail still attached to the head and a second broken off. The purists will probably say I could have used the grains of mud to thermoluminescence date it but the provenance of this is long gone and I'm not rich enough to afford the testing. The top bit is a weird construction but I suspect there were short bits of carved wood in between and several attempts to keep it all together. This was either a two handed phurba/kila or something "Dwayne the rock" held in a movie.

 

Fantastic photos and a fascinating item!

 

Phurbas (phur-bus) often incorporated iron, sometimes meteoric iron. Yours may have been assembled around a wooden shaft, which would explain the nails.

I have found a reference to one very large phur-bu, published in a catalog of an exhibition of Tantric art at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1971. It is described as 80 inches in length - "The huge phur-bu must have been the 'mother phur-bu' from some monastery, probably standing in the main shrine as the repository of all the power distributed into individual phur-bus owned by particular monk-magicians."

Tantra: Catalogue of a Exhibition, Held at Hayward Gallery, London, 30 September- 14 November 1971. Arts Council of Great Britain, 1971.