Metallurgy · a Light

Damascus steel was made from Indian ingots and analysed in 2006

The watered blades were forged at Damascus, Isfahan and elsewhere, but the steel itself arrived as cakes of crucible metal from southern India and Sri Lanka, the material English writers called wootz. The pattern in the finished blade comes from bands of carbide in the metal. The technique lapsed in the eighteenth century, and the best explanation offered is that a particular ore, carrying the trace elements that make those bands form, stopped coming through the trade. In 2006 a group at Dresden dissolved a fragment of a seventeenth century sabre in acid and reported carbon nanotubes and cementite nanowires in what was left, published in Nature. The finding is real; what it means is argued over, and nobody claims the smiths knew. They knew which ore, which heat, and how slowly to let it cool.

Wootz steel · India to Damascus, analysed 2006