Jezail
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The Jezail (Sometimes Jezzail from the Pashto language) is an Afghan matchlock or flintlock musket fired from a forked rest.
The Jezail is most famous, at least in Western literature, as the weapon which wounded Dr. Watson - the fictional biographer of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes - in the Battle of Maiwand during his military service in Afghanistan. The jezail weapon was also mentioned in the George MacDonald Fraser adventure Flashman, whose protagonist describes the awful slaughter of British Army troops retreating from Kabul to Jalalabad by Afghan jezailchis.
The jazail is a simple, cost-efficient and often hand-made musket common to Central Asian and some Middle Eastern Muslim lands of the time. The stocks, barrels, and other simple components were often hand made and sometimes beautifully decorated. The more complex parts were often taken from damaged foreign muskets, most notably the British Brown Bess. Jezails usually have what seem to be unusually long barrels and of a higher calibre than other fronteir guns - as a result of their purely military use. Some jezails are rifled. The jezail was fired using a horn bipod, and the butt was likely tucked under the arm and cradled tightly against the body, as opposed to being held to the shoulder like a standard musket or rifle.
It is used as a metaphor of a cheap and primitive weapon in Rudyard Kipling's poetry describing British casualties in colonial wars:
- A scrimmage in a Border Station
- A canter down some dark defile
- Two thousand pounds of education
- Drops to a ten-rupee jezail.
[edit] External links
- UK National Maritime Museum: Jezail Rifle with photo
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