When in India "died" wootz?

[Richard Furrer]

Jim,
I have been smithing for 26? years and making crucible steel for some 15-17 now and it may be that I have closed my mind to ideas and techniques outside what I currently use....I am not the gate keeper of this information so one can only take my word for so much.
That said I am forging some 22 pounds of crucible steel this week into swords. Just killed a $200 carbide saw blade cutting one ingot apart to see its inside structure.

I have read most of what has been written and translated in English and some which has not, but my major push for research ended some years ago and I now have settled on a technique which works for me. What I see from travelers accounts of old may be taken with a grain of salt...some read poorly and some read fancifully and some read like VCR instructions. We all chose to believe the ones with which we agree.
I know quote a bit about Japanese sword making and yet when I get the odd chance to sit down with a Japanese tosho I always come away with more picky questions than answers and such the nature of the minutia. I wish I could have a window into an old fort smithy in Jodhpur or Isfahan when they were in business, but such is not to be. I can say this with some argument :They knew their material better than we ever will. What I do is guess and experiment and guess some more. Having not grown up in an unbroken tradition means that some things will simply never be known.

I think swords were a specialty and not a common blacksmith item to produce. Surely there were production centers and blade makers got the steel from steelmakers. Blade making is not a common blacksmith trade...if you made general smithed goods such as kitchen utensils/horse shoes then you did not also make swords...swords are a speciality.

Ariel....I would think it VERY rare for one man to do it all.
Though I may make a few ingots from time to time and also make bloomery steel with a mud stack and charcoal I think more likely that the blade maker would purchase the steel and not make it themselves. Production centers may have it all in line...what we call "horizontal manufacturing" today where raw material comes in one end and finished goods out the other. I would think some areas had this, but a lone smith was far too isolated to do such and think a sword maker alone would be rather out of luck to do it all himself. Weapons are something a government controls and weapon makers would be under some laws.......certainly if a village smith were making the odd sword the villagers would be asking for whom he is making it and why that person needs a sword. No I rather think swords were done by groups who specialized in it......till war comes and then EVERYONE is conscripted into some form of weapon production or civil service (wagon parts, general metal items of need).
Ariel you are only one state away.....yet you never visit. Then again I do not get many visitor at all...location location location.

Mahratt,
I have no answer for you. Have not seen any document that would give an end date to crucible steel production nor a reason why such occurred. I would think it like many other trades...it waxes and wains with utility and cost and fashion. I think the lack of a raw material (ore source running out) for such a large production area and time period just plane wrong. I think it far more likely that there is a political and economic reason rather than the elimination of a single ore source.

Ric

[ariel]

Richard,
Thanks for the detailed response.
I did not imply that every ( or any) village blacksmith was making blades from crucible ingots he himself produced in his backyard.

Your question was why so many blades were made of wootz, and that is exactly what I tried to address.

While European steel makers were constantly switching from one technology to another, obtaining more and more of better and cheaper steel faster and faster with progressively decreasing human effort, India and other Eastern societies never reached industrial scale of steel manufacture till the second half of 19 century when the Brits introduced modern technologies there. The "natives" relied on the tried and true cheap and universally-available crucible technology that did not require huge investments in equipment. That could have been done in workshops attached to Royal courts or even in smaller establishments.

Thus, the major portion of steel they produced was crucible steel, and a good portion of it was real wootz.

In a way ( just IMHO) mass production of wootz blades was a pure serendipity: crucible steel was abundant and at the same time beautiful, so making blades out of it was like killing two birds with one stone. In a way, that was similar to the story with bloomery steel: the process was indescribably primitive, resulting in inhomogeneous lump of steel with different carbon content in different areas . But sorting out these small lumps, forging them together and manipulating them produced pattern welded blades in Europe and Nihon-to in Japan.

And people say it is impossible to make a silk purse out of pig's ear :-)))

And you have honestly and beautifully elucidated the importance of uninterrupted tradition: you have been making wootz for "only" 15-17 years and learned the process from scratch. The "natives" were doing it for hundreds of years and transmitting the combined knowledge to their apprentices. A loss of only one generation would throw the whole level of expertise back to the beginning. And that, together with other external factors you have mentioned, killed the whole tradition.

[mahratt]

Originally Posted by ariel

The "natives" were doing it for hundreds of years and transmitting the combined knowledge to their apprentices. A loss of only one generation would throw the whole level of expertise back to the beginning. And that, together with other external factors you have mentioned, killed the whole tradition.

One simple question. Where "lost" this generation?

Moreover, the tradition is usually stored for a long time.