Damascene Meanings |
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How to Spread Confusion | ||||||||
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Enter the words "damascene process" into a search engine and you
will experience a surprise. All articles coming up relate to the making of tiny
metal wires on integrated circuits. Enter "damask" (or the German
"damast"), and you get links relating to the making of special
fabrics. Enter the verb "damascening" (or German
"damaszieren") and you get many meanings. Foremost will be:
damascening = art of inlaying different metals into one another, but the
welding of different kinds of steel is also covered by the term. Enter
"damascus steel" and you find
references to wootz steel. Try the same thing in German ("Damaszener Stahl") and you are referred to pattern
welded swords. And not to forget: a damascene was and is simply a person from Damascus,
the capital of Syria. To a pigeon aficionado, however, it is a special breed of
pigeons. Obviously there are many meanings to words containing the root "damascene". To make things even worse, the meanings of the same word in English or German might be quite different. Enough confusion? I think so. |
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The question is: who is to blame? And what does the city of Damascus have to do with all of this? I'll try to give some answers but it is neither possible nor sensible to go into every murky detail. But first let's go through some of the meanings alluded to above. | |||||||
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Damask
fabric. My mother was proud of her "damast" table cloth and
bed pillow covers. They were only used on special occasions. What her damask
looked like can be seen below. Damask in its original sense was a name given to
one of the five basic weaving techniques of the Byzantine and Islamic weaving
centres of the early Middle Ages. Damascus was such a center but neither the
only one nor particular special, it seems. Nevertheless the "West"
called these special imported textiles "Damask". The damask weaving technique is rather tricky (it employs one warp yarn and one weft yarn, usually with the pattern in warp-faced satin weave and the ground in weft-faced or sateen weave; whatever that means). It makes no sense to feed an expensive technique with cheap materials and therefore expensive materials like silk are typically used for making damask. |
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Damascening is the art of inlaying or encrusting different metals into one another. Typically gold and silver are inlaid into a dark or black oxidized steel substrate. The effect is fetching (note that I avoid the term "kitschy"). | |||||||
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Grooves or undercuts in the substrate are made
with a chisel, followed by hammering wires of the other metal into the grooves.
The Japanese excelled in this technology, as did many other cultures. The
ancient Greeks, for example, used the technology already in the Bronze Age.
The city of Damascus is in no way special to the technique. The term "damascening" for the technology seems to come from England, where the resemblance of some objects made this way to "watered silk" lead to an association with wootz swords that exhibit the "watered silk" pattern, and these swords were (wrongly) called damascene swords then. A whole cascade of nonsense, in other words. As pointed out above, the corresponding German word has an entirely different meaning. The proper German word for "damascening" is "tauschieren", which in turn is derived from the Arabic: tauschija = coloring. |
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Damascene Technology in
Microelectronics This is essentially damascening as defined above once
more - just on an extremely small scale. In essence, you "chisel" a
groove, about half a micrometer deep and many micrometers long, into some
isolating layer on a microelectronic chip and fill it with a metal, typically
copper. Now you have a tiny copper wire, going from here to there on your chip,
connecting whatever needs connecting. Make 50 billion or so of these wires in
the right places, together with a similar number of transistors and so on, and
you have a working chip. No microchip has ever been made in Damascus (or any other Arabic City), so "damascene technology" has nothing whatsoever to do with Damascus. Oh, and don't ask me how it is done - or I will tell you! |
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Damascene Swords | ||||||||
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Enter the German words
"Damast", "damaszieren" or Damaszener Stahl" into a
search engine and you will be rewarded with plenty of pictures that show
pattern welded steel structures, mostly made by modern smiths, interspersed
with the occasional damask table cloth or bed spread. Texts coming with the pictures often refer to the origin of these technique in the orient or the city of Damascus. Somewhat more sophisticated contributions maintain that European smiths tried to emulate the "true damascus" blades; i.e. wootz blades, by pattern welding. |
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The roots of North European pattern welding technique are much older than the making of "wootz" blades in India, Iran, Asia, wherever. Moreover, when the crusaders encountered wootz blades, they might have been impressed by the sharpness of these blades but saw no reason whatsoever to emulate the technique. They had long since outgrown the pattern welded blades of their ancestors. Crusader swords were made from solid steel and good enough for what they had in mind. They did make it into Palestine and so on for quite some time, after all, while the "Sarracenias" with their (maybe) wootz blades did not get all that far during the time of the crusades. | |||||||
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It seems that Conrad Engelhardt, the guy who was instrumental in unearthing the Nydam treasure with all its pattern welded swords, was the first one who used the terms "damascene" in connection with old pattern welded swords. He realized that there was a pattern produced by different metals. He had some magnificent lithographs made to illustrate this; they can be found in his major book. Several pattern welded swords were rendered in great detail, including swords with the special chevron and palmette pattern. Here is plate VI: | |||||||
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That
Engelhardt used the word
"damascene" in the context of composites of two different kinds of
iron / steel is not surprising because pattern welded blades, and in particular
pattern welded gun barrels, were enjoying large popularity in the 19th and
early 20th century. In Germany (and presumably also in Danmark) this was called
"Damaszenerstahl" for all the usually wrong reasons. I'll call it
pattern welded steel for all the reasons given above. In German the proper name
is "Schweissverbundstahl", literally "welded composite
steel"; the patterns are "Schweissmuster" or weld patterns. Engelhardt, however, may not have worried much about the precise meaning of "damascened" because in his book he equates "damascening" not with pattern welding but with inlaying or encrusting. Here is his text: |
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Unfortunately, Engelhardt's use of
the word "damascene" in the context of ancient pattern welded swords
survived to our time. Ironically, the chevron or palmette patterns he
encountered might have been produced to some extent by "damascening =
encrusting and not by pattern welding.
However, all the other patterns are due to pattern welding. How Engelhardt could be ignorant of all the pattern-welded stuff right around him, in particular gun barells), is beyond me. |
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With all this hindsight there is no
longer any reason whatsoever to refer to piling in general and pattern welding
in particular by words that contain variants of "damask". People are
generally not reasonable, however, and are going to talk about "damascene
steel", "chevron damask patterns, damascening a blade" and so
on. Manfred Sache's wonderful book is called "Damaszener Stahl". So be it. As long as it is clear what is meant, there is no problem. I, however, will not do it. I will try to avoid all the damascene words as far as that is possible. |
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Al that remains to do is to consider the "true damascene" swords. That term typically refers to single-edged curved swords (scimitar, kilij, shamsir, tulwar, ..) that were made from crucible steel and show the "watered silk pattern" or in short "water pattern". Wootz blades, in short. Note once more that most swords made from crucible steel do not show the water pattern, either because it is not there or because it has not been made visible. | |||||||
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Does "true damascene" make any sense?
Where these swords really made in the City of Damascus? Well - why not?
"True damascene" or wootz swords were made in many places for quite
some time. Damascus, however, was not special in any way. The core region for
making ancient "wootz swords" was rather present-day Iran, while in
newer times (up to the early 19th century), the honor may have to go to India.
So once more and finally: |
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Critical Museum Guide: Dresden
Critical Museum Guide: Landesmuseum Schleswig-Holstein in Schleswig,
Germany
11.3 Pattern Welding 11.3.1 Background to Pattern Welding
Wagner's "The Ring of the Nibelung"
11.3.3 Evolution of Pattern Welding
11.3.2 More to Pattern Welding
Large Pictures 2 - Chapter 11.3
Osmund Iron in the Gdansk Museum
10.4. Crucible Steel 10.4.1 The Making of Crucible Steel in Antiquity
Theoderic's "Thank You" letter
© H. Föll (Iron, Steel and Swords script)