a lot of knife writers say so without any convincing reference. more telling is written descriptions of the steel being of a “watery pattern” or “damascend.” the latter because it reminded people of “damask,” a cloth with the same watery pattern. we know that patterned blades were being forged in europe durign the viking times (before 1300) until better forging methods did away with the labor-intensive alternate layering of soft and hard steels.
anything?
Invented, no, no more than damask cloth was, nor Toledo steel in Spain. My research on the topic last year told me that Damascus was a prime centre for weapons production during the Islamic heyday, and the Crusaders conflated Damascus being a centre of production of that distinctive material with it being the place of its invention. Its true origin is not clear but almost certainly was in Persia or India.
thanks for that. my own guess would be any of the active weapons centers in western europe, or even constantinople.
The steel itself, quite apart from the implements made from them, seems to have originated with Wootz steel from southern India. Pattern welding was known in early medieval Europe, but the high-quality of “classic” Damascus steel seems to have been down in part to the unique ore used to make wootz, imported into the Middle East and Europe as ingots.
Slight nitpick, the Viking Era was pretty much over by the end of the 11th century.
Pattern welding and wootz Damascus patterns are different. Pattern welding produces patterns by physically welding layers of steel of different carbon contents together and then folding, twisting etc. to create surface patterns when etched with acid. Wootz Damascus patterns arise from the high vanadium content of the Wootz ore that naturally generates carbon segregation during forging.
argh! my thread is ruined! actually mentioning the viking period is not relevant (my mistake.) i should have mentioned the point wherein homogenous steels were good enough to do away with layered/patterned steel for blades. thanks.
nice one but i’m almost sure there has to have been some sort of stack forging and layering done, even for good steels like wootz. i mean, even wootz didn’t come in the form of billets and blanks of uniform quality that allowed one to make a blade, whether through none-radical forging (just tapers and bevels) or the more modern stock removal.
a very small nit pick. acid etching just reveals the layering but some dishonest makers do fine etching to simulate a damascus pattern.
so we stay with damascus steel whose proccess of making we know.
And HERE is Journal of Metallurgy the article explaining it. It’s very interesting. Basically the Damascus effect comes from the combination of the vanadium content and the long, low-heat method of forging. Too much heat, and the vanadium lattice breaks down. It wasn’t the vanadium that provided the strength. It simply provided a guiding framework for the cemetite particles to form on.
Wootz was produced in a ceramic crucible and had sufficiently elevated carbon content to depress its melting point to a level that it became molten. You ended up with a cast “cake” ingot of Wootz and it would be rather uniform when compared with a bloom reduced directly from ore in the solid state.
Stack forging and layering of wootz was not necesary and true wootz patterns were and are different from patten welding. Deliberate pattern manipulation was performed by drilling and notching the blade during forging and then hammering the depressions out, presumably forming forging laps that alter the direction of the intrinsic banding, Check out http://www.forging.org/fierf/pdf/damascus_steel.pdf for more details, and this Scribd article showing modern replication of true damascus crucible steel formed into a blade with ladder and pool-and-eye surface patterns, Damascus Steel Truth | PDF | Steel | Transition Metals
Not sure what you’re referring to here, or even why it’s a nitpick. It may be possible to etch patterns onto the surface of a metal by applying some sort of mask. Is that what you mean?
We know pattern welding, and comparatively recently we have re-learned to how to do wootz damascus. Historically, damascus blades originally referred to the patterned Wootz steel. Pattern welding most certainly was not invented in Damascus. Whether Wootz blades were forged in Damascus, or whether that was simply where they were first encountered by Europeans (during the Crusades), is something I’ve never been able to get a straight answer on. Sources differ.