The Steel That Was Never From Damascus

Crusaders came back from the Levant with stories about swords. Blades that held an edge no European sword held, that flexed without snapping, and that carried a rippling watered pattern in the metal itself.

Europe called it Damascus steel, after the city where it was bought.

It was made in South India.

Ukku

The Tamil and Kannada word is ukku. The English word wootz is a corruption of it, picked up by eighteenth-century Europeans who could not quite hear it.

It was made across a wide belt of the south. In Tamil Nadu. In northern Karnataka. In the Golconda region of what is now Telangana. And in Sri Lanka.

By village smelters. In small clay crucibles. For something on the order of two thousand years.

Roman-era sources describe Indian iron and steel arriving in the Mediterranean. By the seventeenth century, steel was a serious export earner and wootz ingots were being shipped from the Coromandel coast to Persia by the thousand.