Wootz steel in the context of Steel alloy

Ferrous metallurgy is the metallurgy of iron and its alloys. The earliest surviving prehistoric iron artifacts, from the 4th millennium BC in Egypt, were made from meteoritic iron-nickel. It is not known when or where the smelting of iron from ores began, but by the end of the 2nd millennium BC iron was being produced from iron ores in the region from Greece to India, The use of wrought iron (worked iron) was known by the 1st millennium BC, and its spread defined the Iron Age. During the medieval period, smiths in Europe found a way of producing wrought iron from cast iron, in this context known as pig iron, using finery forges. All these processes required charcoal as fuel.

By the 4th century BC southern India had started exporting wootz steel, with a carbon content between pig iron and wrought iron, to ancient China, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. Archaeological evidence of cast iron appears in 5th-century BC China. New methods of producing it by carburizing bars of iron in the cementation process were devised in the 17th century. During the Industrial Revolution, new methods of producing bar iron emerged, by substituting charcoal in favor of coke, and these were later applied to produce steel, ushering in a new era of greatly increased use of iron and steel that some contemporaries described as a new "Iron Age".

Damascus steel (Arabic: فولاذ دمشقي) is the high-carbon crucible steel of the blades of historical swords forged using the wootz process in the Near East, characterized by distinctive patterns of banding and mottling reminiscent of flowing water, sometimes in a "ladder" or "rose" pattern. Damascus steel was reputed to be tough, resistant to shattering, and capable of being honed to a sharp, resilient edge.

Originally, it came from Southern India and Sri Lanka, where the steel-making techniques used were first developed. The term "Damascus steel" is rooted in the medieval city of Damascus, Syria, perhaps as an early example of branding. However, there is now a general agreement that many of the swords, or at least the steel ingots from which they were forged, were imported from elsewhere.