steel in african weapons

[ausjulius]

[QUOTE=LOUIEBLADES]

Originally Posted by ausjulius

come now tell that to the dayaks... :P

or the celts, many didnt wear much atal when they fought,,,.. but they had tempering and lamination techniques equial to those used in the middle ages

it so odd that people had mastered iron productin so well but never advanced the metal craft further.

ausjulius


From what I know the Celts and middle age swords were mostly spring tempered to between 45-50 Rockwell and the laminated blades consisted of a central core which had an outer edge of harder steel welded around the core. I saw no evidence of a differential heat treat or the use of san mai or clay tempering techniques as found in Asian blades. You also must take into consideration that there was a great deal of trade going on of ideas and goods between India,Persia,Central Asia,China and North Africa which may not have reached Central Africa the Congo and South Africa. So the Bantu smiths forged blades in very primitive forges consisting of a hole in the ground a basic bellows and a stone anvil. What they produced worked just fine for their type of warfare and there was no need to fix what was not broken. There was an arms race of in Asia and MidEast and Europe that atributed to the evolution of better arms and manufacturing techniques which in the end produced superior steel bladed weapons which now we see today. As far as the use of armor is concerned the Mid East was hot and dry as was Rhajistan in India so wearing metal armor or chail mail may not have presented as much as a problem as in central Africa were you can have the same heat but with 90 percent plus humidity and the humidity would not only kill you faster via heat stroke but would cause the armor to rust faster.

Lew

you must inspect viing and cletiv wepans more closely, you will be rather surprised of the quality of the blades, ..
on the viking swords for exsamples there is some seaxs and sowrds that surpass even the most complex japanese blades......

unfortunatly there is proably ot a great deal of willingness of the museams in europe to let people mess with so valuable items,

shrilanka and southern india are,, not hot and dry, they are humid and whet and armour abounds, as in vietnam and southern china.. for exsample..
hell the spanish wore it in south america for quite some time,

id say cultural and technical nothing to do with heat,
kiribati it very how and humid, but there exsists very complext body armour.. this has to be as hot as the steel arounr of europe.

technology and culture dosnt have much to do with heat.


but still there must have been something even alittle of metalic body armour ,,
and remember the africans had contact with europeans and arabs for along time ,look how old angola is and remember the portagese were using armour in africa not a regualr basis as were the dutch thers many acocunts of this ..

i wounder if there was not some basic metal armour or chest plate developed at some point in this area, it is very surprising,, '