Over 2,000 years ago, ancient people in the Levant were forging swords made of steel so advanced that blacksmiths would not come close to creating anything of equal quality until modern times. The metal was so strong that the swords could slice straight through objects made of other metals.
The steel, known as Damascus steel, was produced out of a raw material, known as Wootz steel, from Asia. Other materials were added during the steel’s production to create chemical reactions at the quantum level. It was first used around 300 BC, but was produced en masse in the Middle East between 1100 and 1700 AD.
The secret of making the Middle East’s Damascus Steel only re-emerged under the inspection of scanning electron microscopes in modern laboratories.
This is actually misleading.
"Damascus" steel was produced in South India and exported to west asia where it was made into swords and noticed by europeans, Much like "arabic numerals".
There were attempts to recreate the metal but did not achieve the same quality, leading to Indian wootz steel swords to be called "True Damascus" among sword makers.
History of Steel
Damascene Technique in Metal Working
"True" Damascene blades were made from wootz steel only. The Damascene (or water) pattern comes from a striated precipitation of Fe3C particles and not from folding and welding two kinds of material.
As far as we know today, the "true" damascene technique actually worked with a famous kind of steel, so called "wootz" which was produced in India for maybe a 1000 years in a kind of closely guarded monopoly. Wootz was rich in carbon (about 2%; there was a secret carburization technique) and the trick was to precipitate the surplus carbon in a pattern of fine FeC3 precipitates.
More detailed paper:
http://met.iisc.ernet.in/~rangu/text.pdf
“Wootz was the first high-quality steel made anywhere in the world. According to reports of travelers to the East, the Damascus swords were made by forging small cakes of steel that were manufactured in Southern India. This steel was called wootz steel. It was more than a thousand years before steel as good was made in the West.” -J. D. Verhoeven
and A. Pendray, Muse, 1998
What is Wootz?
Its Place in the History of Technology The school or college going student today may not be aware that India’s contributions and prowess in the making of iron and steel were amongst the most remarkable in the ancient world. Of course, many of them may have had the occasion on school tours to visit the imposing Qutb Minar Complex in New Delhi and to admire the splendid Gupta era Iron Pillar (ca 400-420 AD). It stands as a monument to a glorious Indian tradition in the field of ferrous metallurgy. The Iron Pillar, the earliest and the largest surviving iron forging in the world, is regarded as a metallurgical marvel because it has defied the laws of corrosion of iron even after so many centuries, earning the nickname, the ‘rustless wonder’.
However, the Iron Pillar is not the only testimony that there is to the skills of ancient Indian iron and steel metallurgy. There is another truly remarkable story that is not so well known.
This is the chronicle of the legendary wootz steel from India, which has long been a subject of much fascination around the globe, with many legends and accounts surrounding it. This book highlights the fact that India led the world in developing an impressive tradition more than two milennia ago of making high-grade steel in South India, known as wootz.
But what is this strange word, wootz?
The term was coined, when European travellers from the 17th century onwards came across the making of steel by crucible processes in Southern India in the present day states of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. Wootz was the anglicization of ‘ukku’, the Kannada word for steel. The fame of steel from India is well captured in the words of the Arab Edrisi (12th century) who commented that: ‘the Hindus excelled in the manufacture of iron and it is impossible to find anything to surpass the edge from Hinduwani or Indian steel’ Wootz steel has also become synonymous with Damascus steel since it was used to make the fabled Damascus swords.
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Historically speaking, much has been written about Indian wootz steel by the travellers from Italy, France and England. This is reviewed in Chapter 5 entitled ‘Crucible Steel and Indian Armoury: Sixteenth to Nineteenth Century Accounts’. These provide evidence that wootz steel was made by crucible processes over a fairly vast geographical area of Southern India over nearly half the size of Europe in a large semi-industrial enterprise with shipments of tens of thousands of wootz ingots being sent to places such as Persia.
India was not only known during this period for its mastery in making the raw material of steel, but was also highly reputed for its swordsmithy as exemplified by accounts of the unsurpassed excellence of a swordsmith of Thanjavur.