The Luristan Project - Results from Cut Sword;   Part 4

Discussion of the "Cut Sword" Findings

1. You wanted a blade that looked perfect, without visible flaws on the outside. This necessitated that the top and bottom sheets of the blade / hilt stack was made from "good" iron.
2. Wherever you wanted to put on the figures on the lower hilt and pommel plate or the rings by crimping, you had to make sure that these parts consisted of soft iron, i.e. ferrite or mild steel. I strongly believe that it is simply impossible to chisel off the crimps and bend them over the figures / rings if you encounter the brittle hypereutectoid steel found in several places.
   Indeed, as far as investigated, these parts of the blade / core did consist of relatively good ferrite.

1. Grinding and polishing the "simple" parts like the blade / hilt piece, the pommel plate, and the "wires" for the rings. Sounds not too difficult but try to do that by hand without the benefit of standardized emery paper, all kinds of files, and grinding wheels / power tools.
2. Carving the figures. As pointed out in the main text, that was the only way you could produce these enigmatic heads and "lions". How do you do this without a range of good steel tools? Well, maybe they had steel tools? We don't know but I think it is quite likely. In any case, they obviously did have some artists (not smiths) who could turn the raw pieces into a finely detailed sculptures.

• Assyria had conquered 20 or more "kingdoms" in the general area, and we do not have any idea of what kind of iron technology these kingdoms commanded. Nor do we know all that much about heir religious believes. Some of those entities might well have promoted an art / religion that produced something similar to the the iconographic heads and "lions" found on the mask swords. The general style of these figures certainly is alien to the well-known Luristan style (or any other style found in the larger area during the time in question). A not so common design made these things particularly attractive for the "tourists" (in the embodiment of soldiers / conquerors).
• Assyria, as reasoned above, must have had a big and thriving iron industry. It also had a stratified society with rich and powerful people who could afford useless but decorative and very expensive trinkets. The Luristanis, as far as we know, didn't have all that.
• If the Luristanis did venture into iron technology at some (later) point in their metal-working history, one would expect that they would have kept the basic design of their bronze stuff as exemplified in thousands of known artifacts. Indeed, the iron Luristan swords of type II are quite similar to the bronze types. The mask swords are not. .
• A civilization that has turned out thousands of bronze weapons (not to mention comparable numbers of bronze finials, horse cheek pieces, etc.) and put it into the graves of their people, should have produce more than just a 100 iron swords.
• Maybe the iron mask swords were very expensive? Quite likely - but then you would have expected to find them in rich graves of rich people. Nobody knows exactly where they have been found, but the robbed graves were all quite similar, no hint of especially big or otherwise outstanding burials. This means that the owners of the mask swords had the same social status as the many more non-owners. Well, the graves of the pensioned off mercenaries / warriors who by good fortune were able to acquire one of the mask swords (or were given one for outstanding service) would not be much differernt from the graves of their swords-less brethren.

• No cast iron; the sword consists of many iron parts put together in a not always quite clear manner (for Naumann)
• It's rather unclear how the (in Naumann's case heavily corroded) figures were made.
• One is inclined to assume fire welding but Naumann's results were not yet conclusive for him (even so his blade investigations do suggest this).
• The bulk of the blade consist of wrought iron / mild steel but parts of the (small) area investigate also showed large carbon concentrations.
• Lots of elongated slag inclusion demonstrate some drawing out the material by forging
• Widmanstätten structures plus spheroidized cementite point to high temperature forging in an early state of its making.
• Pearlite structures show medium temperature (700^o ) working at the end.
• Twinning (not observed in our case) hints at local heavy impact deformation at low temperature (e.g. by adjusting parts by heavy hammer blows as required for scrimping)
• Chemical analysis shows relatively clean iron with mostly some C and Si, the latter most likely from the slag inclusions) .
• You need to "destroy" a sword by cutting it apart if you want to answer the many questions still open. Namann is all for doing that.

• No closely comparable material is known, and their place of origin has not been exactly ascertained, though a number of the weapons have been found in tombs in Luristan.
• Although these works are generally recorded as coming from Luristan there is no evidence to show that they were made there.
• The iron daggers are indeed a foreign element among Luristan bronzes, and though only one of the specimens is known to have come from Pontus, that must be the original provenance of them all. In Pontus, iron, easily workable, lies above ground."
  ??? Pontos is the area around the black sea and there are (ancient Greek) claims that iron technology originated there. Maybe, maybe not. Certain is only that no elemental iron was lying around above ground.
• It is evident that at the time when they were being manufactured some very efficient workshops must have been available, and that the separate parts of the weapons were mass produced. The sword may have been worn as a badge of honor, awarded perhaps to some distinguished company of warriors for a notable deed of valor.
  A version of my "trophy brought back from time spent as mercenary".

• It seems likely then that our sword was hand-forged from wrought iron, and that the parts worked over became carburized during the frequent heating process and took on the pattern of mild steel." No, it didn't became carbunized, certainly not to the degree shown in the metallographic picture from a tiny are at the beard of on of the figures. Here are details.
• "Still unresolved remains the remarkable similarity of the various swords, particularly that of the ornaments. It could be that the main parts of the swords were hand-forged and so have varied proportions, but that the sophisticated ornaments, which are of lower carbon content, were formed by swaging."
  No, swaging was not an option; see here.

• The blade and the grip are a single piece of metal.
• The two seated lions forming the guard, and the pair of bearded human heads facing outwards, with lions' heads facing inwards, that decorate the pommel have been applied by fitting them into recesses formed in the metal. Here again adhesion of the applied parts has not been achieved by heat welding, but by burring over the edges of the recesses, a process already fully discussed elsewhere.
• Close examination under the binocular microscope showed the presence of a number of areas in which copper corrosion products were present. At first it was felt that these were due to contact with corroding bronze objects, but a closer inspection revealed that iron corrosion products from the weapon itself overlay areas of copper corrosion, and one is forced to conclude that areas of this hilt may have been covered with a copper alloy
  The only hint in the literature of some finish of the swords. A bronze coating doesn't make sense, however. Why coat a figure made in a tiresome way from iron with bronze, if it would be far easier to just cast one?

• "A competent blacksmith does not rely upon rivets and bands and burred edges to hold his work together; he uses, rather, a hammer weld carried out in the hot."
  No, he wouldn't! That would destroy the carved figures!
• "To be blunt, seen in terms of black- smithing these swords are a mess, and any of them could have been better made by the barbarian smiths of central Europe, certainly by the eighth century B.c. "
• Certainly not. They were also not made for fighting but for showing off.
• "Equally, the fact that, in certain cases, the iron had become carburized does not of itself argue that the makers were intentionally converting some of the iron to steel, but only that the metal was being subject to long, or frequent, periods of heating in carbon."
  Wrong.. There is no substantial carburization ever during forging.
• "It is precisely the incompetence of the smiths that is so interesting: they had so obviously not fully realized the potentialities of the metal they were working. In fact, when one looks critically at the methods of manufacture employed-the use of flanges to hold insets, the punch technique of decoration, and the final planishing-one is reminded as much, if not more, of the bronzesmith than the blacksmith."
  Wrong. Just try to forge an iron mask sword with all the modern tools and methods and you will find it rather difficult.

• "Iranian smiths in the period 800 (±200) 8,C, were highly skilIed. although they were unacquainted with some of the basic methods of ironworking. Their forging, which involved the use of special swages, is magnificent"
  This is exactly the opposite of what Maxwell-Hyslop mentioned.
• "It was mentioned earlier that the steel in the grooves cut to receive the bands on the hilt and pommel of No. 105 had been superficially cold-worked in a manner that suggested working with a chisel. Actually the ferrite in the most heavily cold-worked areas has recrystallized to an extremely small grain size and in similar areas that are pearlitic the carbide has become spheroidized. This indicates that the mechanically finished dagger had been heated for a short time to a temperature perhaps as high as 650 °C."
  Quite likely true.. Some light annealing after all the room temperature crimping would have been beneficial.
• "There are no records describing the surface appearance of iron objects in the period under discussion, but it seems somewhat unlikely that they would have been bright".
  Well. It is exactly the brightness of polished iron that made it so special in ancient times.

• It's figures have 64 carnelian inlays, never seen (so far) on any other mask sword.
• The blade is not set at a right angle to the axis running from head to head on the pommel like all others (see below).
• It's hilt is rather primitive in comparison to our "cut" sword or to the Louvre sword and its brethren

1. The iron used was rather inhomogeneous. Mostly ferrite / mild steel but with high carbon concentrations in some part. It also an contained many large slag inclusions. The concentration of P, S and some other elements was rather low, however.
2. The figures must have been made by forging the rough outline and then finishing somehow with tools (i.e. "carving" in a general sense).
3. Forging took place at high temperatures (Widmannsätten structures) followed by finalizing at lower temperatures (spheroidized cementite) and possibly a final mild anneal. Some cold working is also evident on occasion.
4. The craftsmanship is superb; the way of assembling the pieces by "crimping" unique. The finished sword is most certainly not a weapon but a honor or show-off item.
5. No clear evidence of fire welding has been found.
6. No clear evidence of using low / high carbon materials conscientiously by the smith has been found.
7. There is no standard composition of mask swords. We have blade / hilt in one part or composed of many parts. Simple rings around the hilt or more involved structures. Long / short blades. But the figures are always quite similar and the general appearance is unmistakable.

1. We have definite occurrence of fire welding - in contrast to point 5 above. Note, however, that in most cases above the samples were too small to find definite prove of fire welding, and that some of the old picture may well contain welds.
2. We raise strong points about a conscientious choice of material for certain parts of the sword by the old smiths. We can't prove it beyond doubt, however.
3. We suggest that the old smith used "bad" material on purpose (for the invisible inside) and "cut corners" in the construction whenever the result couldn't be seen. They had no intention of making a useful weapon but rather a piece of art (an money).