Place · Levantine capital & steel market · Syria
Damascus
The market and forging centre that gave its name to Damascus steel — blades whose watered surface pattern comes from the crucible steel ingots imported from south India and Sri Lanka, where the technique of making them had been worked out by the early centuries CE.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 33.514, 36.276
Worth knowing
The raw material was Indian; the reputation was Syrian. European smiths could not reproduce the pattern for centuries, and the technique was lost around 1750, probably because the specific ore with its trace vanadium ran out.
Connections (6)
- Trade routeWootz steel region, Telangana
Damascus blades were forged from crucible steel ingots imported from south India and Sri Lanka, where the technique of melting iron with carbon in sealed clay crucibles had been worked out by the early centuries CE. The watered surface pattern that made the blades famous comes from the ingot, not from the Syrian forging. European smiths could not reproduce it for centuries, and the technique was lost around 1750 — probably because the specific ore, with its trace vanadium, ran out.
- Architectural modelAdina Mosque, Pandua
The Adina at Pandua was built in 1373 on the plan of the Great Mosque of Damascus — a vast hypostyle hall with a central nave under a barrel vault and a raised royal gallery — and at the time it was the largest mosque in the subcontinent. A Bengal sultan reaching for a Syrian Umayyad model, and building it in brick faced with stone taken out of local temples, is the clearest single statement of what that dynasty wanted to be.
- Trade routeGolconda
Golconda's diamonds left through the Coromandel ports for Persia, the Levant and Europe, and the same routes carried the Deccan's crucible steel to Damascus to be forged into blades. Tavernier came inland to the mines in the 1640s and left the fullest account of how they were worked — by thousands of labourers under a system of licences, with the sultan taking the largest stones and the merchants bidding for the rest.
- Trade routeKollur / Golconda diamond fields
The Krishna valley gravels supplied the world's large diamonds and the Deccan also supplied the crucible steel that Damascus forged into blades — two commodities from the same plateau moving west along the same routes through the Coromandel ports and Persia. Tavernier travelled for both, and his Travels is the fullest account of either trade. Both ended within a few decades of each other in the eighteenth century, one to Brazilian competition and one to the exhaustion of a particular ore.
- AnalogueCórdoba
Damascus steel and the Indian numerals both reached Europe through the Islamic world and both lost their origin on the way. The ingots were made in Tamil and Sinhala crucible furnaces and forged in Syria; the digits were Indian and are still called Arabic. Al-Khwarizmi's ninth-century treatise on Indian reckoning is the text Cordoba's translators passed to Latin Europe.
- Trade routeVenice
Damascus and Venice are the two ends of the Levant leg, and between them lay the whole spice trade of the fifteenth century: cargo landed at Hormuz or Jeddah, carried overland, and sold to Venetian buyers at Damascus, Aleppo or Alexandria. Conti learned his Arabic on that road, and the Cape route destroyed the arrangement within sixty years of his return.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Damascus”. Archaeological Survey of India and State Archaeology monument records, and the standard regional literature.
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