“True” Damascus steel is not a “lost art”
This article doesn&#x27;t address the 1998 discovery that the &quot;lost&quot; art was the presence of vanadium in the ores that real damascus blades were made from.  The vanadium gave the steel its strength from the 13th to 17th centuries or something like that.  It was present in iron ore mined in a particular region, and those mines eventually ran out, after which the &quot;recipes&quot; for damascus steel weren&#x27;t lost, they simply stopped working and no one knew why.  They had no way to tell the difference between iron ore from one place and ore from another.<p>This is explained in the 1998 Verhoeven, Pendray, and Dauksch (VPD) article]1] that the reddit post cites without touching on this crucial aspect.  Or anyway, I thought that VPD&#x27;s explanation was now generally accepted.  This isn&#x27;t anywhere near my field though.<p>[1] Verhoeven, John D. et al. “The key role of impurities in ancient damascus steel blades.” JOM 50 (1998): 58-64.