Metallurgy · a Light

Damascus steel was made from Indian ingots and then lost

The blades called Damascus steel carry a watered pattern of light and dark bands in the metal itself. They were forged from wootz, a crucible steel made in South India and Sri Lanka and traded west as small cakes of metal, so the city gave the blades a name rather than a birthplace. Production faded in the eighteenth century and the method was lost. In the 1990s John Verhoeven and Alfred Pendray reproduced the pattern and showed it depends on trace elements, vanadium among them, present in particular ores, which explains why the craft died when a supply changed. A 2006 paper reported carbon nanotubes in one sabre sample. That finding is still discussed, and it does not mean the smiths knew what they had.

Wootz steel · South Asia and Syria