Damascus steel may be the most discussed, most controversial—pretty much the most of everything—topic in the custom knife community. As with the majority of intriguing topics, one question that always arises is “who was the first to do it?”—in this case, who was the first to forge damascus? The answer: nobody knows.
In the foreword of Manfred Sachse’s , Dr. Michael Dauskardt writes that damascus steelmaking was apparently already member Bill Moran’s early catalogs indicates Merovingian Franks and the Vikings made “pattern-welded” blades as early as the second century A.D., and the Japanese used a type of damascus in their early samurai swords. According to , wootz, what some refer to as the “true” damascus, dates at least to the 15th century if not earlier.
