hand-forged! poorly! not even from round stock! when's the last time anyone bothered to do that?
So the deal is this is a moroccan moukhala, a snaphaunce musket design north africans bootlegged and then kept turning out for... several centuries after snaphaunces were almost immediately abandoned for flintlocks everywhere else. This is an if anything fairly restrained example of the genre, with a lot of very nice bone inlay (which is what initially caught my eye) and the weird 1/2"-thick bladed stocks they made in the mountains down south, allegedly for tucking under your armpit to fire while mounted. Hammer still cocks and fires (now that I've pulled it all apart and removed a century or two of rust), and comes with a boot as a bonus, for kicking ass with; but the catch that's supposed to reset the pan cover after firing is worn out so I won't be taking it on any raids in rough weather.
Guns almost exactly like this were produced consistently from the 1600s to the present day (although this side of the World Wars they're more likely to be nonfunctional tourist souvenirs), but the interesting thing to me is the degree of hand forging, on down to the fasteners. Mass-produced machined bolts are 17th-century technology same as the rest of the gun, European colonialism and trade had thoroughly penetrated the region by the early-mid 19th, and this isn't a detail anyone from that point onward is likely to go through even to fake antiquity (the business end of the bolt being on the inside and invisible after all) so even allowing for the Anti-Atlas being a bit of a backwater this one could plausibly have seen the shores of Tripoli that the Marines are always going on about. I'll probably never know, because it carries absolutely nothing in the way of proof or maker's marks and I got it bundled with some ~1950s souvenir pirate pistols at a junk sale.
Very odd artifact of an era combining fairly sophisticated technical expertise and isolation from outside world so total you can't buy a goddamn screw, where craftsmen made a living producing elaborately ornamented clockwork mechanisms absolutely from scratch from an iron bar, a bit of silver, and a dead camel.
The pirate guns have some pretty nice filigree too