Kindi on swords and iron

ariel · 19th November 2008, 10:54 PM

What is interesting to me, is the open statement of al-Kindi that wootz was coming to Persia from India.
We are accustomed to the statements about wootz being a genuinely Iranian invention, that Indian masters learned their craft only late (16-17th centuries) etc, etc. In fact, the noun wootz is always preceeded by an adjective Persian, implying the purely Iranian origin: from the beginning to the end. The contribution of Indian metallurgists is not even glossed over; it is buried in silence. Al-Kindi's book is cited very frequently, but the passage cited here is usually conveniently omitted.
In fact, what we learn from here and from Indian sources
http://materials.iisc.ernet.in/~woot...tage/WOOTZ.htm
is that wootz was manufactured in India and that Iranians just bought the output en masse and re-sold it elsewhere. No doubt, Iranians achieved the highest levels of proficiency in manufacturing blades from Indian wootz, but the honor of inventing and manufacturing wootz should rightly belong to India.

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19th November 2008, 10:54 PM	#9
ariel Member Join Date: Dec 2004 Location: Ann Arbor, MI Posts: 5,503	What is interesting to me, is the open statement of al-Kindi that wootz was coming to Persia from India. We are accustomed to the statements about wootz being a genuinely Iranian invention, that Indian masters learned their craft only late (16-17th centuries) etc, etc. In fact, the noun wootz is always preceeded by an adjective Persian, implying the purely Iranian origin: from the beginning to the end. The contribution of Indian metallurgists is not even glossed over; it is buried in silence. Al-Kindi's book is cited very frequently, but the passage cited here is usually conveniently omitted. In fact, what we learn from here and from Indian sources http://materials.iisc.ernet.in/~woot...tage/WOOTZ.htm is that wootz was manufactured in India and that Iranians just bought the output en masse and re-sold it elsewhere. No doubt, Iranians achieved the highest levels of proficiency in manufacturing blades from Indian wootz, but the honor of inventing and manufacturing wootz should rightly belong to India.