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Ancient Persians were Making "20th-Century" Chromium Steel 900 Years Ago

posted by martyb on Friday September 25 2020, @04:41PM   
from the Shiny! dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Ancient Persians were making "20th-century" chromium steel 900 years ago:

One manuscript in particular grabbed their attention. Titled al-Jamahir fi Marifah al-Jawahir, which translates to "A Compendium to Know the Gems", the manuscript was written in the 10th or 11th century CE by the polymath Abu-Rayhan Biruni. Crucially, it contained the only known recipe for forging steel in high-temperature crucibles. The problem is, it can be difficult to follow a thousand-year-old recipe.

"The process of identification can be quite long and complicated and this is for several reasons," says Marcos Martinon-Torres, last author of the study. "Firstly, the language and the terms used to record technological processes or materials may not be used anymore, or their meaning and attribution may be different from those used in the modern science. Additionally, writing was restricted to social elites, rather than the individual that actually carried out the craft, which may have led to errors or omissions in the text."

One ingredient, referred to as "rusakhtaj," puzzled the archaeologists. Eventually they identified it as the ore mineral chromite, which can be used to make chromium crucible steel. Importantly, this was backed up by the discovery of traces of chromite and chromium in artifacts from the Chahak site.

Mixing chromium into steel to make tool steel or stainless steel was thought to be a 19th-20th century invention.

Journal Reference:
Rahil Alipour, Thilo Rehren, Marcos Martinón-Torres. Chromium crucible steel was first made in Persia, Journal of Archaeological Science (DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2020.105224)

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Original Submission

• Re:Not ancient Re:Not ancient (Score: 4, Informative) by Dr Spin on Friday September 25 2020, @08:55PM (1 child)

  by Dr Spin (5239) on Friday September 25 2020, @08:55PM (#1056939)

  s that the same Islam that got invented in 800AD?

  Yes. People used to live for thousands of years before Islam.

  In answer to an earlier question as to when Ancient was:

  It was before written history, which, in the UK, does mean BC. In the rest of Europe it mostly means much older than that - like 8,000BC.

  In America, it means "Before 1950" - "The Flintstones" is convincing evidence that the 1950's were the stone age - in America.

  --
  Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!

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• Re:Not ancient (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @04:30AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @04:30AM (#1057114)

  In answer to an earlier question as to when Ancient was:

  It was before written history, which, in the UK, does mean BC. In the rest of Europe it mostly means much older than that - like 8,000BC.

  No. Ancient history begins with *recorded history*, that is with the advent of writing [wikipedia.org]:

  Ancient history as a term refers to the aggregate of past events[1] from the beginning of writing and recorded human history and extending as far as post-classical history. The phrase may be used either to refer to the period of time or the academic discipline.

  The span of recorded history is roughly 5,000 years, beginning with the Sumerian cuneiform script, with the oldest coherent texts from about 2600 BC.[2] Ancient history covers all continents inhabited by humans in the period 3000 BC – AD 500.

  We call the time *before* writing, prehistory [wikipedia.org]:

  Human prehistory, also known as pre-literary history[1], is the period between the use of the first stone tools by hominins c. 3.3 million years ago and the invention of writing systems. The use of symbols, marks, and images appears very early among humans, but the earliest known writing systems appeared c. 5,300 years ago and it took thousands of years for writing systems to be widely adopted.

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