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These things are fascinating. There is a great documentary on them done by Nova. It is available on YouTube. It was really well done. It explains in depth the metallurgy and how they were actually made. It is theorized that the Persians actually made them to order for Viking traders. Much like real Damascus steel, the secrets were kept with a small group of people and was lost over time. There were even counterfeits from the same time frame. Examining them under a micoscope you can tell the fakes from the real ones by the metal strucutre.
It basically comes down to the fact that the Persians knew of the crucible steel process way before its time and the Vikings liked to imbue their swords with the ashes of ancestors or spirit animals. The combination of the two acidentally made steel that was centuries ahead of its time. I highly recommend checking out the documentary.
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I saw the Nova special and it was quite interesting.
Here's something from Wiki and it was the Indian and Sri Lankan steel centers who developed crucible steels, moreso than the central Asian areas.
From Wiki:
"Crucible steel is generally attributed to production centres in India and Sri Lanka where it was produced using the so-called "wootz" process, and it is assumed that its appearance in other locations was due to long distance trade.[1]
Only recently it has become apparent that places in Central Asia like Merv in Turkmenistan and Akhsiket in Uzbekistan were important centres of production of crucible steel.[2]
The Central Asian finds are all from excavations and date from the 8th to 12th centuries AD, while the Indian/Sri Lankan material is as early as 300 BC. In addition, India's iron ore had trace vanadium and other rare earths leading to increased hardenability in Indian crucible steel which was famous throughout the middle east for its ability to retain an edge.'"
Chris