This hilt employs low-relief carving as its primary technique, with the entire surface covered in a dense foliate program featuring rosettes, scroll tendrils, and a small floral element that recurs as a repeating motif. The material is a warm amber-brown with a slightly translucent quality suggesting a resin-impregnated wood or a naturally amber horn; the carved lines are darkened to create contrast against the lighter ground. The form is the familiar recurved pistol-grip, broader in the pommel area than the Javanese norm, with a small rounded mendak knob at the base.
The carving vocabulary, with its compact interlocking floral scrolls and rosette fillers, is consistent with both Malay Peninsula and Sumatran practice. Within the H group this hilt and H05 and H06 together constitute the Malay ornamental sub-group, and taken together they document a coherent alternative to both the Balinese figural approach and the Javanese material approach to hilt decoration. The decorative philosophy here is one of total surface coverage with non-figural ornament, in which the hilt presents craft mastery through pattern density rather than iconographic program. This non-figural manner is one strand of Malay practice rather than the whole of it, since the Peninsula also produced celebrated figural hilt forms, among them the jawa demam (the so-called fevered Javanese), the kingfisher-like pekaka of Kelantan and Patani, and the demonic tajong; H04 through H06 document the ornamental rather than the figural side of a single regional tradition.
