Историческое оружиеведение (Feb 2024)
Chemical composition of blades as an attributing feature for bulat steels of the Indo-Persian region of the 17th-19th centuries
Abstract
The article is devoted to historical bulat blades of the Indo-Persian region. Based on a range of sources, the article reveals that comprehensive studies on historical bulat steels have been sporadic over the last hundred years due to an insufficient number of bulat samples suitable for experiments to determine patterns between steel composition, structure and properties. Attention is drawn to the fact that attribution of certain bulat blades from the collection of K.S. Khaidakov and D.A. Sukhanov raised doubts about their production time and their region of origin. Standard typological attributive features of oriental bulat blades were combined with changes occurred in the Modern Period (the 16th – 19th centuries) with charge and fluxes of crucible process. As a result, a trend was revealed in the presence/absence of a certain number of permanent impurities in patterned steels, which are found only in the Indo-Persian region before the beginning of the 19th century. The research result marks out that not all crucible steels which have a distinctive pattern on the blade surface can be considered as bulat by chemical composition. The article describes in detail and confirmes on specific examples the chemical sign of attribution by the quantitative content of permanent impurities. The article presents new data concerning chemical composition of 20 collectible bulat blades of the 17th-19th centuries, including shamshirs by Asad (Asadullah) of Isfahan. It also outlines various types of patterns from the private collections of K.S. Khaidakov and D.A. Sukhanov with the indication of their corresponding chemical composition. The authors conclude that in terms of chemical composition, macro- and microstructure, Indo-Persian bulat crucible steels form a separate group of historical blade steels, which were produced before the changes in traditional metallurgical production of the Indo-Persian region under the influence of new European technologies.
