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Originally Posted by Richard Furrer
There are hundreds of metallurgical analysis of medieval and earlier European blades and dozens of chemical analysis...many published in various articles in "Gladius".
In general a small slice is taken from the blade (a triangle cut from edge to center not all the way across) and this is cold mounted in resin and polished then etched and photographed under the microscope. Pieces can also be spectrographed for chemistry. Neither is all that hard to do well, but there is a procedure.
Such can be done from poor examples of good provenance...many museums have such pieces which are not good enough to display and some even just sit and rust away on a shelf as conservation funds are low.
Once enough body of information is amassed one can make assumptions as to what is of a certain time and place. It makes fakes that much more difficult to pass as originals.
I suggest the work of Drs. Alan Williams and David Edge of The Wallace. As well as Drs. Janet Lang, Paul Craddock and Barry Ager of the British Museum. The Royal Armouries did some good work till they sacked the dept.
These are only a few British researchers..there have counterparts all over Europe.
Ric
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Salaams Ric!
Thank you very much for your clarification. I have Ewart Oakeshott's "Archaeology of Weapons" and it includes analyses of some pattern-welded blades; as well as homogenous non-crucible steel sword-blades. I remember the average percentage of carbon in the pattern-welded blades was anywhere from 0.4 to 0.6%, while the carbon content in the Ulfber(h)t sword-blades was around 0.75% on average. Hank Reinhardt once wrote that the carbon content in European medieval swords could have reached as high as 1.2%, but he said the average percentage of carbon was around 0.8%.
Regarding the early Arab sword-blades, these were usually forged from Indian crucible steel. I do not know if any of the swords in Topkapi or the Askeri Museum in Istanbul were analyzed. But for Indian crucible steel, the average carbon content in the sword-blades was around 1.4 - 1.8%. I know that the appearance of the damask wave patterns also depends upon certain trace elements, like Vanadium and Molybdenum...and even Manganese may play a role. There are other proofs for the high-carbon content in these Arab sword-blades, like what the sources said that they became brittle during very cold temperatures. Also, the procedures mentioned in the early Islamic sources in order to know a good blade from a bad one, are very important to me.
Perhaps there are private collectors who maybe willing to donate one or more of their Arab sword-blades for analyses.
BTW, the Arab sword attributed to the Holy Prophet (PBUH); that is now preserved in al-Hussein Mosque in Cairo, Egypt has been chemically analyzed in the laboratories of the Cairo University. That was in the mid-1970s. The results have proven that it was forged from Indian crucible steel, with pearlite and cementite particles; if I could remember. The results were published in the Journal of the Faculty of Archaeology-Cairo University in January 17th 1976.
Thank you for giving me the names of the references that include the results of the analyses done to many medieval European sword-blades.
Best regards,
Ahmed Helal Hussein