The article from Journal Cimmerian :
When Donn Othna and his Saxon captors sail storm-driven and battered into the harbour of Nagdragore on the Gulf of Cambay, after a voyage for which epic is an understatement, the Briton’s sword hums faintly. Donn Othna explains that it sings because it’s coming home. “It was here that my sword was born from furnace and forge and wizard’s hammer, dim ages ago. It was once a great saber belonging to a mighty Eastern emperor … ”
Donn Othna might well believe the sword, if Indian, was a work of wizardry. The original Damascus steel was developed in India, and it was long centuries before such superb blades were able to be made in the Middle East. Persians and then Syrians did eventually learn the art, but they couldn’t equal the results without importing the raw steel from India to work with. It’s likely that the iron ore from certain mines in southern India contained a particular combination of trace elements — vanadium, nickel and others — that made the blades unique once they were forged with painstaking art to produce high-carbon steel.
We can assume the “great saber” was a typical Indian tulwar. Who the “mighty Eastern emperor” could have been is a matter for guesswork, but the blade’s history makes it clear that he lived before Alexander the Great. Maybe he was Darius I of Persia. Darius conquered the Indus valley shortly before 500 B.C. The various kingdoms of northern India at the time — the sixteen mahajanapadas or “great countries” — would have become worried by that. Despite their name, none was so great or powerful next to the Persian Empire. One of them, Avanti, lay squarely where the much later “Nagdragore” was situated, east of the Gulf of Cambay. Another kingdom, Saurashtra, though not one of the sixteen, lay on the Gulf itself. Nagdragore probably combined the former territories of both
More details at : http://www.thecimmerian.com/a-double-edged-blade-of-a-sinister-blue/
Donn Othna might well believe the sword, if Indian, was a work of wizardry. The original Damascus steel was developed in India, and it was long centuries before such superb blades were able to be made in the Middle East. Persians and then Syrians did eventually learn the art, but they couldn’t equal the results without importing the raw steel from India to work with. It’s likely that the iron ore from certain mines in southern India contained a particular combination of trace elements — vanadium, nickel and others — that made the blades unique once they were forged with painstaking art to produce high-carbon steel.
We can assume the “great saber” was a typical Indian tulwar. Who the “mighty Eastern emperor” could have been is a matter for guesswork, but the blade’s history makes it clear that he lived before Alexander the Great. Maybe he was Darius I of Persia. Darius conquered the Indus valley shortly before 500 B.C. The various kingdoms of northern India at the time — the sixteen mahajanapadas or “great countries” — would have become worried by that. Despite their name, none was so great or powerful next to the Persian Empire. One of them, Avanti, lay squarely where the much later “Nagdragore” was situated, east of the Gulf of Cambay. Another kingdom, Saurashtra, though not one of the sixteen, lay on the Gulf itself. Nagdragore probably combined the former territories of both
More details at : http://www.thecimmerian.com/a-double-edged-blade-of-a-sinister-blue/
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