The Mystery of the Damascus Sword and India's Materials Heritage

In this blog, I would like to tell you the story of carbon steel and the India connection. Carbon steel is the most used engineering material today and accounts for 85-90% of steel produced worldwide.

To tell this story one must start at Salaudin and Richard the Great facing-off during the crusades. It is said that Richard the Great cut through a tree trunk with one swipe of his sword to show his might and the capability of his sword. In response, Salaudin is purported to have just tossed a silk scarf into the air and let it slide off his blade’s edge, cleanly cutting it into two. Richard recognized that it was indeed a great sword that could cleave free falling soft material without the use of any force. Salaudin’s sword was known to be a Damascine sword.

There is now a general agreement that the Damascus steel which made its way into the western world through the crusades was produced in India rather than in Damascus. This steel was known as Wootz steel, potentially derived from the word ‘ukku’ which means steel in Telugu and Kannada. Damascus swords were known to be extremely hard and flexible to the hilt and able to cleave a free-falling silk scarf or a block of wood with the same ease.

A good person to talk to on this subject is Sharada Srinivasan. I first met her when her father, Dr. Srinivasan, retired director of the Bhabha Atomic Research Center, gave a talk at my invitation to the GE Global Research team at Bangalore. I was surprised to know that a field such as archaeometallurgy existed outside of Indiana Jones movies. Sharada has a Ph.D. in this area, and has worked on topics such as the pancha-loha(five metal alloys – traditionally described as alloys of gold, silver, copper, brass, and iron used in South Indian metal sculptures), and Wootz steel. In her paper on the topic, she concludes that high-grade ultra-high carbon steel was indeed produced by crucible processes in South India.

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