1.2.0.

Objectives
In this lesson, students investigate the historical development of metallurgy in ancient India.. After
studying this lesson you will be able to:
 understand the origin, consequences and significance of metallurgy in ancient India;
 discuss the origin and development of copper, gold, Iron and other metal in ancient India;
 investigate the textual references of metallurgy in ancient India and
 Identify the socio-economical significance of metallurgy in ancient India.
1.2.1. Introduction
Technology is today defined as applied science, but early humans developed technologies such as
stone-working, agriculture, animal husbandry, pottery, metallurgy, textile manufacture, bead-making, wood-
carving, cart-making, boat-making and sailing-with hardly any science to back them up. If we define
technology as a human way of altering the surrounding world for making life easier, we find that the first
stone tools in the Indian subcontinent go back more than two million years! Jumping across ages, the
‗Neolithic revolution‘ of some 10,000 years ago saw the development in agriculture in parts of the Indus and
the Ganges valleys, which in turn triggered the need for pots, water management, metal tools, transport, etc.
Metallurgy brought about important changes in human society, as it gave rise to a whole new range of
weapons, tools and implements. Some of these had been made in stone earlier, it is true, but the result was
coarser as well as heavier. Metal, precious or not, is also a prime material for ornaments, and thus enriches
cultural life. Metallurgy may be defined as the extraction, purification, alloying and application of metals.
Today, some eighty-six metals are known, but most of them were discovered in the last two centuries. The
‗seven metals of antiquity‘, as they are sometimes called, were, more or less in order of discovery: gold,
copper, silver, lead, tin, iron and mercury. For over 7,000 years, India has had a high tradition of
metallurgical skills; let us see some of its landmarks.
1.2.2. Copper Metallurgy in Ancient India
1.2.2.1. Harappan Civilization:
The first evidence of metal in the Indian subcontinent comes from Mehrgarh in Baluchistan, where a
small copper bead was dated to about 6000 BCE; it is however thought to have been native copper, not the
smelted metal extracted from ore. The growth of copper metallurgy had to wait for another 1,500 years; that
was the time when village communities were developing trade networks and technologies which would
allow them, centuries later, to create the Harappan cities. Archaeological excavations have shown that
Harappan metal smiths obtained copper ore from the Aravalli hills, Baluchistan or beyond. They soon
discovered that adding tin to copper produced bronze, a metal harder than copper yet easier to cast, and also
more resistant to corrosion. Whether deliberately added or already present in the ore, various ‗impurities‘
such as nickel, arsenic or lead enabled the Harappans to harden bronze further, to the point where bronze
chisels could be used to dress stones. Shaping copper or bronze involved techniques of fabrication such as
forging, sinking, raising, cold work, annealing, riveting, lapping and joining.
Among the metal artifacts produced by the Harappans, objects discovered are spearheads,
arrowheads, axes, chisels, sickles, blades (for knives as well as razors), needles, hooks, and vessels such as
jars, pots and pans, besides objects of toiletry such as bronze mirrors; those were slightly oval, with their face
raised, and one side was highly polished. The Harappan craftsmen also invented the true saw, with teeth and
the adjoining part of the blade set alternatively from side to side, a type of saw unknown elsewhere until
Roman times. Besides, many bronze figurines or humans such as the well-known ‗Dancing Girl‘, for
instance and animals like rams, deer, bulls etc. have been unearthed from Harappan sites. Those figurines
were cast by the lost-wax process: the initial model was made of wax, then thickly coated with clay; once
fired which caused the wax to melt away or be ‗lost‘, the clay hardened into a mould, into which molten
bronze was later poured. Harappans also used gold and silver to produce a wide variety of ornaments such as
pendants, bangles, beads, rings or necklace parts, which were usually found hidden away in hoards such as

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ceramic or bronze pots. While gold was probably panned from the Indus waters, silver was perhaps extracted
from galena, or native lead sulphide.
1.2.2.2. Beyond the Harappans:
In the later phase of Harappan culture, a ‗Copper Hoard‘ culture of still unclear authorship produced
massive quantities of copper tools are underway central and northern India. Later, in the classical age,
copper-bronze smiths supplied countless pieces of art. Let us mention the huge bronze statue of the Buddha
made between 500 and 700 CE in Sultanganj in Bihar, measuring 2.3 m high, 1 m wide, and weighing over
500 kg, it was made by the same lost-wax technique that Harappans used three millenniums earlier. So were
thousands of statues made later in Tamil Nadu, such as the beautiful Nataraja statues of the Chola period,
among other famous bronzes. Of course, all kinds of bronze objects of daily use have continued to be
produced; for instance, highly polished bronze mirrors are still made in Kerala today, just as they were in
Harappan times.
1.2.3. Gold Metallurgy
The noble metals, gold and silver, are found in the native state, and as is well known, gold and silver
were used to make jewelry and sheet metal due to the great ductility and lustre of the pure metals. Some of
the early rich finds of gold artifacts were from the cemeteries in Bulgaria in Europe (5th millennium BC)
with accouterments of hammered and sheet gold. Some of the most elegant gold vessels made by the
repousse technique come from the Mesopotamia (ca 2500 BC). Spectacular gold castings are known from
ancient Pharaohnic Egypt, such as the enigmatic face of the young Pharaoh Tutenkhamen (ca 1300 BC).
Early gold and silver ornaments from the Indian subcontinent are found from Indus Valley sites such as
Mohenjodaro (ca 3000 BC). These are on display in the National Museum, New Delhi.
In antiquity gold would usually have been collected by panning alluvial sands from placer deposits.
However India has the distinction that the deepest ancient mines in the world for gold come from the Maski
region of Karnataka with carbon dates from the mid 1st millennium BC. A rather delightful piece of
conjecture is that tales of Herodotus, the Greek, about ‗gold-digging ants‘ from India refers to marmot, a type
of rodent found in Afghanistan, who dig up the river sand which could then have been panned for gold by
the inhabitants.
Surface tension was used to turn melted gold filings into spheres. The granulation technique was also
used to make gold jewelry in India in the late 1st millennium BC to early Christian era. Interestingly, as far as
silver production goes, the Aravalli region in north-west India along with Laurion in Greece and the Roman
mines of Rio Tinto in Spain ranks amongst the few major ancient silver producing sites from about the mid
1st millennium BC onwards.
1.2.4. Iron Metallurgy in ancient India
While the Indus civilization belonged to the Bronze Age, its successor, the Ganges civilization,
which emerged in the first millennium BCE, belonged to the Iron Age. But recent excavations in central
parts of the Ganges valley and in the eastern Vindhya hills have shown that iron was produced there possibly
as early as in 1800 BCE. Its use appears to have become widespread from about 1000 BCE, and we find in
late Vedic texts mentions of a ‗dark metal‘ (krṣnāyas), while earliest texts (such as the Rig-Veda) only spoke
of ayas, which, it is now accepted, referred to copper or bronze. Whether other parts of India learned iron
technology from the Gangetic region or came up with it independently is not easy to figure out. What seems
clear, however, is that the beginnings of copper-bronze and iron technologies in India correspond broadly
with those in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and the Caucasus, but were an independent development, not an
import.
1.2.4.1. Wootz Steel
Instead, India was a major innovator in the field, producing two highly advanced types of iron. The
first, wootz steel, produced in south India from about 300 BCE, was iron carburized under controlled
conditions. Exported from the Deccan all the way to Syria, it was shaped there into ‗Damascus swords‘
renowned for their sharpness and toughness. But it is likely that the term ‗Damascus‘ derived not from
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Syria‘s capital city, but from the ‗damask‘ or wavy pattern characteristic of the surface of those swords. In
any case, this Indian steel was called ‗the wonder material of the Orient‘. A Roman historian, Quintius
Curtius, recorded that among the gifts which Alexander the Great received from Porus of Taxila (in 326
BCE), there was some two-and-a-half tons of wootz steel-it was evidently more highly prized than gold or
jewels. Later, the Arabs fashioned it into swords and other weapons, and during the Crusades, Europeans
were overawed by the superior Damascus swords. It remained a favoured metal for weapons through the
Moghul era, when wootz swords, knives and armours were artistically embellished with carvings and inlays
of brass, silver and gold.
Wootz steel is primarily iron containing a high proportion of carbon (1.0-1.9%). Thus the term
wootz applies to a high-carbon alloy produced by crucible process. The basic process consisted in first
preparing sponge iron; it was then hammered while hot to expel slag, broken up, then sealed with wood
chips or charcoal in closed crucibles that were heated, causing the iron to absorb appreciable amounts of
carbon; the crucibles were then cooled, with solidified ingot of wootz steel remaining.
Right from the 17th century, several European travellers documented India‘s iron and steel-making
furnaces. From the 18th century, savants in England, France and Italy tried to master the secrets of wootz; the
French Jean-Robert Bréant, conducting over 300 experiments by adding various metals to steel, understood
the role of the high carbon proportion in wootz, and was the first European who successfully produced steel
blades comparable to the Indian ones. Together, such researches contributed to the understanding of the role
of carbon in steel and to new techniques in steel-making.
The second advanced iron is the one used in the famous 1,600-year-old Delhi Iron Pillar, which, at a
height of 7.67 m, consists of about six tons of wrought iron. It was initially erected ‗by Chandra as a standard
of Vishnu at Vishnupadagiri‘, according to a six-line Sanskrit inscription on its surface. ‗Vishnupadagiri‘ has
been identified with modern Udayagiri near Sanchi in Madhya Pradesh, and ‗Chandra‘ with the Gupta
emperor, Chandragupta II Vikramaditya (375-414 CE). In 1233, the pillar was brought to its current location
in the New Delhi‘s Qutub complex, where millions continue to come and see this ‗rustless wonder‘.
But why is it rustless, or, more precisely, rust-resistant is still a major question. Here again, numerous
experts, both Indian and Western, tried to grasp the secret of the pillar‘s manufacture. Only recently have its
rust-resistant properties been fully explained. They are chiefly due to the presence of phosphorus in the iron:
this element, together with iron and oxygen from the air, contributes to the formation of a thin protective
passive coating on the surface, which gets reconstituted if damaged by scratching. It goes to the credit of
Indian blacksmiths that through patient trial and error they were able to select the right type of iron ore and
process it in the right way for such monumental pillars.
There are a few more such pillars in India, for instance at Dhar (Madhya Pradesh) and Kodachadri
Hill (coastal Karnataka). Besides, the same technology was used to manufacture huge iron beams used in
some temples of Odisha, such as Jagannath of Puri (12th century). The iron beams at Konarak‘s famous sun
temple are of even larger dimensions. Chemical analysis of one of the beams confirmed that it was wrought
iron of a phosphoric nature (99.64% Fe, 0.15% P, traces of C, traces of S and no manganese).
1.2.5. Zinc
The earliest firm evidence for the production of metallic zinc is from India. Of the metals used in
antiquity zinc is one of the most difficult to smelt since zinc volatalises at about the same temperature of
around 1000oC that is needed to smelt zinc ore. Indian metallurgists were familiarity with zinc deserves a
special mention because, having a low boiling point (907°C), it tends to vaporize while its ore is smelted.
Zinc, a silvery-white metal, is precious in combination with copper, resulting in brass of superior quality.
Sometimes part of copper ore, pure zinc could be produced only after a sophisticated ‗downward‘ distillation
technique in which the vapour was captured and condensed in a lower container. This technique, which was
also applied to mercury, is described in Sanskrit texts such as the 14th-century Rasaratnasamuccaya.
There is archaeological evidence of zinc production at Rajasthan‘s mines at Zawar from the 6th or
5th century BCE. The technique must have been refined further over the centuries. India was, in any case, the
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first country to master zinc distillation, and it is estimated that between 50,000 and 100,000 tons of zinc was
smelted at Zawar from the 13th to the 18th century CE! British chroniclers record continuing production
there as late as in 1760; indeed, there is documentary evidence to show that an Englishman learned the
technique of downward distillation there in the 17th century and took it to England-a case of technology
transfer which parallels that of wootz steel. Another remarkable artistic innovation by Indian metalworkers of
the past was the use of zinc in making highly elegant bidri ware, an inlayed zinc alloy, which came into
vogue under the Muslim rulers of the Bidar province in the Hyderabad region from about the 14th century.
AD.
1.2.6. Social Context of Metallurgy in Ancient India
We should finally note that most of India‘s metal production was controlled by specific social
groups, including so-called tribes, most of them from the lower rungs of Indian society. For instance, the
Agarias of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh are reputed iron smiths, and there are still such communities
scattered across Jharkhand, Bihar, West-Bengal, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Together, they contributed
substantially to India‘s wealth, since India was for a long time a major exporter of iron. In the late 1600s,
shipments of tens of thousands of wootz ingots would leave the Coromandel Coast for Persia every year.
India‘s iron and steel industry was intensive till the 18th century and declined only when the British started
selling their own products in India while imposing high duties on Indian products. Industrially produced iron
and steel unavoidably put a final stop to most of India‘s traditional production.
1.2.7. Textual reference on ancient Indian Metallurgy
Note: Many texts of chemistry refer to the working of metals, especially precious ones (a few
extracts are below), but it should be kept in mind that some of India‘s greatest metallurgical advances-such as
wootz steel or rust-resistant iron-do not figure in any known texts; they were the work of communities of
craftsmen who perfected such practices from generation to generation, but did not generally leave written
testimonies behind.
1.2.7.1. Rig-Veda:
There are many more references in the Vedas to metal and metal-working, often used as a metaphor.
The word for metal was ayas, which in the Rig-Veda, refers to copper or bronze, not to iron. In later
literature, terms like krsnayas, kalayasa or syamayas, i.e., ‗dark metal‘, came into use, which clearly referred
to iron; loha (literally, ‗red‘) or lohāyas initially referred to copper, but later became a generic term for metal,
and often came to mean iron.
1.2.7.2. Arthasastra:
Kautilya‘s famous treatise of governance and administration, the Arthasastra, dates back to Mauryan
times, a 4th centuries BCE. A passage, from a long chapter on the ‗department of mines‘, reveals an intimate
knowledge of the different types of metal ores and the ways to test and purify different metals, or to create
alloys. Kautilya said, that the Director of Mines, being conversant with the sciences of metal veins in the
earth and metallurgy, the art of smelting and the art of colouring gems, or having the assistance of experts in
these, and fully equipped with workmen skilled in the work and with implements, should inspect an old mine
by the marks of dross, crucibles, coal and ashes, or a new mine, where there are ores in the earth, in rocks or
in liquid form, with excessive colour and heaviness and with a strong smell and taste.
1.2.7.3. Varahamihira (5th CE):
In Khaḍgalakṣaṇam, Varahamihira explains the process of carburization and hardening of iron
swords. Carburization is the controlled addition of carbon to iron, so as to turn it into steel; it is usually done
by adding organic substances, whether vegetal or animal, in the course of the smelting.
1.2.7.4. Nagarjuna (7th or 8th century CE):
Narjuna, in his, Rasendramaṅgalam, a process for whitening copper is described. It would be
interesting to try and put such recipes to test so as to assess their value.

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1.2.7.5. Vagbhata
Vagbhaṭa (13th century), in his Rasaratnasamuccaya gives us a systematic exposition of the
principal metals in a well-known text of alchemy. Each metal‘s properties and medicinal uses are clearly
brought out, although, of course, within the alchemical framework of the times.
1.2.8. Classification of metals in Ancient Indian literature
Acoording to ancient Indian literary reference, in nature there are four suddha lohas (native metals)
viz., suvarṇa (gold), rajata (silver), tamra (copper) and loha (iron). In addition there are two putilohas- naga
(lead) and vaṅga (tin) and three misra loha (alloys) viz., pittala (brass), kaṃsya (bell metal) and varta loha (an
alloy made of five metals). The term loha is derived from the root luh which means karsana.
1.2.9. Conclusions
The above discussion indicates that there is growing evidence to suggest that ancient Indian
metallurgists have also made major contributions which deserve their place in the metallurgical history of the
world along with other great civilizations of the world. As clearly seen in the case of zinc and high-carbon
steel, ancient India contributed significantly to their modern metallurgical advances and in the development
of metallurgical study leading to the Industrial Revolution in Europe.
1.2.10. Summary
 The first evidence of metal in the Indian subcontinent comes from Mehrgarh in Baluchistan, where a
small copper bead was dated to about 6000 BCE.
 Archaeological excavations have shown that Harappan were master craftsman and had knowledge
on copper metallurgy. Even they manufactured bronze by mixing copper and tin.
 In the post Harappan culture, a „Copper Hoard‟ culture of still unclear authorship produced
massive quantities of copper tools are underway central and northern India. In the classical age,
copper-bronze smiths supplied countless pieces of art.
 India has the distinction that the deepest ancient mines in the world for gold come from the Maski
region of Karnataka with carbon dates from the mid 1st millennium BC.
 While the Indus civilization belonged to the Bronze Age, its successor, the Ganges civilization, which
emerged in the first millennium BCE, belonged to the Iron Age.
 India was a major innovator in the field, producing two highly advanced types of iron. The first,
wootz steel, produced in south India from about 300 BCE, was iron carburized under controlled
conditions.
 Right from the 17th century, several European travellers documented India‟s iron and steel-making
furnaces.
 The second advanced iron is the one used in the famous 1,600-year-old Delhi Iron Pillar, „rustless
wonder‟ which, at a height of 7.67 m, consists of about six tons of wrought iron.
 The earliest firm evidence for the production of metallic zinc is from India. Of the metals used in
antiquity zinc is one of the most difficult to smelt since zinc volatalises at about the same temperature
of around 1000oC that is needed to smelt zinc ore.
 There is archaeological evidence of zinc production at Rajasthan‟s mines at Zawar from the 6th or
5th century BCE.
 Most of India‟s metal production was controlled by specific social groups, including so-called tribes,
most of them from the lower rungs of Indian society. For instance, the Agarias of Uttar Pradesh and
Madhya Pradesh are reputed iron smiths, and there are still such communities scattered across
Jharkhand, Bihar, West-Bengal, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Together, they contributed substantially to
India‟s wealth, since India was for a long time a major exporter of iron.
 Many texts of chemistry refer to the working of metals, especially precious ones. Some of them such
as Kauṭilya‟s Arthasastra, Varahamihira‟ Khaḍgalakṣaṇam, Nagarjuna‟ Rasendramaṅgalam,

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