Though it is known that the steel used to make Damascus swords came as “steel blocks” or “wootz ingots” from south India, not much is known about the Indian contribution to the implementation of a fabrication technique that may have existed in India before the Arabs began forging their deadliest blades, commonly called Damascus swords. Wootz is a hard, high-carbon steel developed in India around 300 BC and used in making Damascus steel.
Researchers undertook metallographic examination of two Indian iron objects, including a thin weapon-like iron plate from a 2nd century BC to 2nd century AD site in Junnar to arrive at these deductions. Vasant Shindeformer vice-chancellor of Deccan College, told TOI that shaping of a thin plate out of an irregular steel mass required much mechanical work at elevated temperatures. “It’s believed that the most superlative of the Damascus swords were made outside India, using Indian steel, in the middle-east. However, the analysis indicates that the art of making weapons or swords by turning iron into not just wootz blocks but thin steel, as is used to make swords or like weapons, could have been perfected by the Satavahanas,” he said.
The study suggested that a proper technique for the control of microstructural evolution in high carbon steel was established in India much earlier than the beginning of the Damascus steel tradition.
“We could trace the existence of this technology back to almost 2,200 years ago, to the time of the Satavahanas. It seems that they had full knowledge of chemistry and temperature conditions apt for forging metals, even when no thermometers existed,” said Shinde, who is currently a Bhatnagar fellow at the Hyderabad-based CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, an institute under the ministry of science and technology.
“We had little idea about the Indian technology used then to turn iron ore to steel by forging and hardening methods. The study showed that the people from ancient India added the right amount of carbon into iron ore and used a method called ‘quenching’ while forging. The aim is to preclude brittleness or cracking in the metal. We feel that this technology may have later travelled to other parts of the world, including west Asia and Korea,” he added.
The study was recently published in peer-reviewed journal ‘Archaeometry’ by University of Oxford.