Kirill A. Rivkin
About me
Dr. Kirill A. Rivkin, specializing on Asian Swords, Author of many monographs and articles on the subject. All photographs and texts are
More infoMy Books
A Study of the Eastern Sword
A Study of the Eastern Sword by Kirill Rivkin and Brian Isaac, attempts for the first time to consider evolution of swords in Asia over the course of the last two millennia as a whole – from Scythians and Sarmatians,...
Arms and Armor of Caucasus
While the book’s main focus is on the development of arms and armor in Caucasus between the sixteenth and the early twentieth centuries, it does so in a more general context of period Eastern weapons, from those of late Mongol...
Last Articles
Nihonto in numbers
Posted on 18th December 2018After posting the statistics regarding “Oriental” weapons I’ve decided to do a similar study on Japanese swords, i.e. combining the results of sales I monitored for the past 10 years. As before, in quite a few cases those had to be extrapolated (hence the round numbers) since some months were simply...
How rare are the Eastern Swords?
Posted on 18th December 2018How rare are historical edged weapons when it comes to things we call Middle Eastern, Islamic, Eastern, Caucasian – basically the whole region we attempted to cover in “A study of the Eastern Swords”? I’ve looked through my database of sales, compiled for the past 10 years and calculated the total number...
Kiyomaro, modern papers and 100% guarantee
Posted on 23rd October 2018At each assembly of American collectors there is always plenty of private talks about supposed issues with this or that kind of papers and various conspiracies involving NBTHK, yakuza or “major Japanese dealers”. It usually boils down to that there are bad papers (green, early Hozon, late TH, NTHK-NPO etc....
Cynical things to learn first in Arms and Armor
Posted on 4th October 2018I’ve started to write a second portion of my “rules of quality research”, this time dedicated to what I consider most fabulous failures of historical science, but then it became obvious that it is easier to start with Arms and Armor – which as it is day is ridden with...