History of metallurgy in the Indian subcontinent Quotes

“Gods, doing holy acts, devout, resplendent, smelting like ore their human generations.”

“Grey iron is its flesh, copper its blood. Tin is its ashes, gold its colour, the blue lotus flower its scent.”

“When the Harappan civilisation experienced the Copper Age in the Indus valley, southern India experienced the Iron Age.”

“There will never be another nation, which understood separate types of swords and their names, than the inhabitants of India...”

“If Janak's child be mine no more,
In splendour fair as virgin ore,
The lordship of the skies and earth
To me were prize of little worth.”

“His finger on the rock he laid,
Which veins of sanguine ore displayed,
And painted o'er his darling's eyes
The holy sign in mineral dyes.”

“The working with wootz is so difficult, that it is a separate art from that of forging iron.”

“Wikipedia: History of metallurgy in the Indian subcontinent”

“There is a cake which is supposed to be steel from India and the kind to be rated most highly in Egypt. I could find no artisan in Paris who succeeded in forging a tool out of it.”

“Archaeologically . . . the problem of the Aryans and their association with iron remains as confusing as ever, regardless of the earlier strongly expressed theories of their apparently tautological association.”

“Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–215) commented on Indian iron’s superior blades: ‘does the table knife not cut unless it has an ivory handle?’ and ‘do we have to use metal forged in India to carve our meat?’”

“The workmanship of the native hilts can scarcely be surpassed... The districts of Salem, Koimbatur, and North Arkat, (in Tamil Nadu, are those) in which the best Indian steel has been manufactured from time immemorial...”

“He led the mournful lady where
Resplendent gold adorned the stair,
And showed each lattice fair to see
With silver work and ivory:
Showed his bright chambers, line on line,
Adorned with nets of golden twine.”

“The Hindus seem to have been the first people to mine gold.... Much of the gold used in the Persian Empire in the fifth century before Christ came from India. Silver, copper, lead, tin, zinc and iron were also mined-iron as early as 1500 B.C.”

“The fallen rain, and falling still,
Hung like a sheet on every hill,
Till, with glad deer, each flooded steep
Showed glorious as the mighty deep.
The torrents down its wooded side
Poured, some unstained, while others dyed
Gold, ashy, silver, ochre, bore
The tints of every mountain ore.”

“That foremost one of Dasarha's race also gave unto Subhadra as her peculium ten carrier-loads of first class gold possessing the splendour of fire, some purified and some in a state of ore.”

“The traditional view, that iron was brought into the subcontinent by invading ‘Aryans’, is wrong on two counts: there is no evidence of any knowledge of iron in the earliest Vedic texts, where ayas stands either for copper or for metals in general, and the idea that the aryas of the Rigveda were invaders has become just as questionable.”

“The mention of iron in [Hindu] texts is as solid a chronological indicator as one can expect in the reconstruction of protohistory and cannot be cursorily dismissed. Moreover, the dates for iron in India are in sync with the dates for this metal attested in central Asia and Iran: if anything, the Indian context is the earliest and most likely to have influenced the others.”

“Their (Indians) chemical skill is a fact more striking and more unexpected... They knew how to prepare sulphuric acid, nitric acid and muratic acid; the oxide of copper, iron, lead (of which they had both the red oxide and litharge), tin and zinc: the suphuret of iron, copper, mercury, and antimony, and arsenic; the sulphate of copper, zinc and iron; and carbonates of lead and iron. Their modes of preparing these substances were sometimes peculiar.”

“The Indians are very good at making various compounds of mixtures of substances with the help of which they melt the malleable iron; it then turns into Indian iron, and is called after al-Hind. There, in al-Hind, are workshops where swords are manufactured, and their craftsmen make excellent ones surpassing those made by other peoples. In the same way, the Sindi, Sarandibi and the Baynimani iron vie with one another for superiority as regards the climate of the place, skill in industry, the method of melting and stamp­ing and beauty in polishing and scouring. But no iron is comparable to the Indian one in sharpness.”