Originally Posted by Tim Mitchell
I normally hang out on FB and the Bladesmithsforum but I recently came across this thread which I somehow missed. It has been a pretty good discussion of the topic which is vague at best in historical and academic circles.
For those of you who don’t know me, I have been making wootz for about 18 years now, and I was originally mentored by Al Pendray in making wootz. I have also been researching and mentoring smiths for most of that time.
I think it wonderful that browsing this thread I found references which I hadn’t seen before and information which I hadn’t considered. These sort of discussions help everyone to learn more and I have enjoyed the discussion greatly, even the light verbal sparring.
I would like to share from my knowledge and experience on the topic, with the realisation that there were many things which affected the decline of wootz and even the assumption that it totally died out is likely false. It never totally dies out until the last person who saw an ancestor making ingots and forging out blades, who is making them themselves… dies.
That being said, we have lost specific information about how specific patterns were extracted from ingots, there is no dispute there.
The last mention in print which I am aware of concerning the making of wootz ingots is from C. Ritter Von Schwarz in 1901. He was in charge of iron production in Bengal during the end of the 19th century. He said the industry was mostly dead but that it was still being made in Lalitpur, Narsinghpur, Mahabaleshwar, Shivamogga, Kardur, Chitradura, and other districts of India. If anyone would have known the state of the industry at that time it would have been him. This was from Stahl und Eisen #21 1901.
I have not found any mention after this point. If it was still being produced at these locations in India in 1901 then it would have slowly tapered off for several decades afterwards. Sharada Shrinivasan interviewed a smith in Telangana who worked wootz steel as a youth. His precise age is not known as far as I have heard, but if we assume he is in his 80s, say 85, and he was 15 or older when he was forging wootz.. reasonable assumptions… then he was likely forging wootz as part of his community around 1950. There are also other smiths according to her who remember the time when wootz was worked.
The reasons for the decline of production is far from simple. I can tell you for a certainty that it was not the “ore deposit running out” which was only ever a very casual theory and should have been remembered as such. There is no evidence at all for such a conclusion.
These were the main reasons for the decline:
1) westernisation of warfare required fewer edged weapons
2) systematic efforts of the British to force dependance in technology and industry and goods upon the Indian people. It was total subjugation with bans on exports of goods in the 1800s including wootz export. They did everything to crush traditional industry and knowledge networks.
3) Famines and food scarcities caused by the high taxation of the British and monopolisation of the food as well as pushing farmers to make cash crops not food crops. This happened between 1770 and 1850s. People were trying to survive and the artisans struggled heavily at this time.
4) deforestation by poor management by the British caused an ecological disaster which then required a poorly executed Forest Act in 1865 and bans on free access to wood for making charcoal. This drove the price of charcoal high and affected the bloomery iron industry and the wootz industry.
5) corruption mentioned by Voysey of the land owners causing crucible steel price hikes.
6) the British flooding the market with cheap steel and iron from England caused less of a demand for wootz steel and as export of the steel was banned in the mid 1800s only small amounts could be made and sold in the local Indian market.
7) the westernisation of India promoted a taste for English steel utensils and a lowering of demand for traditional wootz products. Not sure how much this would have affected things but it would have been a factor.
8) Labour being taken for building railroads and being used for portage would have interrupted the ability of the iron working artisans to ply their trade.
There are other reasons which I haven’t mentioned but these are the main ones.
Concerning Mongolian wootz, it is actually true that crucible steel blades were made in Mongolia. It was called Ginte-Bulat and a Russian language paper was written on the subject by Puravzhal Bayasgolan in 2002. She showed sufficient evidence for it’s existence and it was high in Molybdenum and Tungsten from the ores which were used in the local area.
The pattern of wootz steel blades today is every bit as good as the blades in past centuries. Not all surface patterns have been fully replicated but many have.
The dendritic pattern of the ingot is formed during slow solidification of the ingot and then it is the smith who controls what that pattern will become. Forging temperatures are the key to getting the pattern to either stay crystalline, or become watered. If you don’t forge high enough then the pattern will stay crystalline. So I can tell by looking at old blades at what approximate temperature they forged the ingot at initially.
Forging it high enough converts the dendritic pattern to a watered pattern. This was Al’s secret and it is very subtly in the last few papers if you know where to look. The other characteristics of the surface patterns are determined by carbon content in the ingot, specific trace elements such as Phosphorus, Nobium, Vanadium, Manganese, molybdenum, Chromium etc. Different elements create different surface pattern characteristics. Then depending on how you forge and heat treat the steel you will get varied pattern types or looks. This is separate to surface deformation, how close you forge to your final blade shape, whether you grind more on the edge and even possibly the shape of the ingot or if you mainly forge on one side of the ingot.
All these things, and if you roast the ingot or not, affect the final pattern. Wootz ingots were made in India, Persia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Mongolia, Northern India, Turkey and several other places.. The different trace elements in those ingots affected how good the blade could be if forged by a good smith and heat treated properly. The patterns are intimately linked to the quality of the blade and how they will perform, and the only reason that we haven’t duplicated some patterns of old exactly is that we don’t have analysis of the blades and we haven’t replicated ingots with that chemistry. When we take Mn loaded steel and expect to get patterns like some of the old blades we just are dreaming. The Persian steel had more Mn in it because of the sulphur in the ore, the old Persian recipes included pyrolusite (MnO), so we can tell often if a blade was of Persian or Indian steel. There is a pattern difference.
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