Detroit Steel: Re-examining and Rehousing the Arms and Armor Collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts (original) (raw)

ANYONE who follows the ancient and glorious history Of arms, whether as a collector or as a student, has surely in his reading often run across the term ~damascened steel or Damascus steel, or simply damas-cus, applied (not always in correct or pertinent fashion) to the constituent materials of edged weapons or of the barrels of firearms. The reason for a particular type of steel having borne the name of a city in the Near East is something which still evades our inquiries. Yet it may be put on record that at the end of the high Middle Ages the trade in steels and blades of oriental manufactures was concentrated precisely in the ancient city of Damascus, in Syria, the Dimisk as-Sham of the Arabs; here, indeed, it appears that important arms manufac-tories had existed as far back as the era of Diocletian. Yet around 1400 the city of Damascus was conquered by the hordes of Timur i Leng (Tamerlane), which enslaved the inhabitants and removed the best ar-tificers, whereupon an effective local center of arms production ceased almost completely to exist. But in the same city a flourishing textile industry continued to live on, for which reason one cannot exclude the possibility that by reason of the external appearance, the immediate visual impression, which the oriental blades indeed conveyed to the eye of the beholder, the steel of which they were composed may borne a name which commemorates the famous patterned textiles that are still called damask-just as the Italian word majolica derives, through late Latin majorica, from the Balearic island Mayorca. The ambiguous meaning of the term and its late attribution to most disparate qualities of steels, however, owe their origin to the indiscriminate use which was made of it in past centuries, and especially in the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries, by European voyagers and commentators ; and the justification for this arises from the confused state of metallurgical knowledge, which the refinement of methods of metal-lurgical research and the progress of the science of metals have only within the last century contrived to place in a certain order, historically and technologically. ANYONE who follows the ancient and glorious history of arms, whether as a collector or as a student, has surely in his reading often run across the term damascened steel or Damascus steel, or simply damas-cus, applied (not always in correct or pertinent fashion) to the constituent materials of edged weapons or of the barrels of firearms. The reason for a particular type of steel having borne the name of a city in the Near East is something which still evades our inquiries. Yet it may be put on record that at the end of the high Middle Ages the trade in steels and blades of oriental manufactures was concentrated precisely in the ancient city of Damascus, in Syria, the Dimisk as-Sham of the Arabs; here, indeed, it appears that important arms manufac-tories had existed as far back as the era of Diocletian. Yet around 1400 the city of Damascus was conquered by the hordes of Timur i Leng (Tamerlane), which enslaved the inhabitants and removed the best ar-tificers, whereupon an effective local center of arms production ceased almost completely to exist. But in the same city a flourishing textile industry continued to live on, for which reason one cannot exclude the possibility that by reason of the external appearance, the immediate visual impression, which the oriental blades indeed conveyed to the eye of the beholder, the steel of which they were composed may borne a name which commemorates the famous patterned textiles that are still called damask-just as the Italian word majolica derives, through late Latin majorica, from the Balearic island Mayorca. The ambiguous meaning of the term and its late attribution to most disparate qualities of steels, however, owe their origin to the indiscriminate use which was made of it in past centuries, and especially in the XVlIIth and XIXth centuries, by European voyagers and commentators ; and the justification for this arises from the confused state of metallurgical knowledge, which the refinement of methods of metal-lurgical research and the progress of the science of metals have only within the last century contrived to place in a certain order, historically and technologically.