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| Tipu Sultan of Mysore,India. facebook.com |
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| Tipu Sultan's sword- hilts with tiger theme.mangalorean.com |
There
are so many pictures and paintings of Tipu Sultan with his famous
legendary sword. He always used special swords whenever he went to
war. He was brave and quick besides being a great strategist.
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| Tipu Sultan's sword- British museum. itdunya.com |
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| Tipu Sultan's short sword-silver engraved. ancintarms.biz |
Tipu
Sultan who ruled
Mysore
till 1799, fought four wars with the British using
his legendary sword and at last
died fighting with his
famous sword.
His swords are prized items
and
are now part of valuable collections in various
museums
in England. what was so special about them ? Unlike
swords made for fighting in wars, Tipu's unique
sword had
an incredibly hard and sharp edge that could easily rip through the
opponent’s armor. This quality of the sword came from a special
type of high carbon steel called ''Wootz'' which was produced all over
south India. Wootz steel,
when made into swords,
produced a very sharp edge with a flowing water pattern. This pattern
came from very small carbon crystals embedded in the iron produced in
many hundreds of smelting furnaces in Mysore.
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| Tipu Sultan's famous sword,Royal collection. www.flickr.com |
Francis Buchanan, who toured through Mysore in 1800, a year after Tipu Sultan’s death, had left us an account of the technique by which these amazing Wootz steels were produced in many hundreds of smelting furnaces in Mysore. In these furnaces, iron was mixed with charcoal and put inside small clay pots. Through an intricate control of temperatures, the smelters produced high grade steel ingots that were used for sword making, not just in India but in West and Central Asia too. Wootz is an anglicized version of the Kannada word ukku, Telugu hukku and Tamil and Malayalam urukku – meaning hardened steel. It was light weight and very strong.
Michael
Faraday, the legendary scientist and discoverer of electricity and
electromagnetism, spent four years studying the properties of Indian
Wootz (1818-22).
However,
the Wootz steel making process, which was
so widely
known in south India, was completely lost by the mid-nineteenth
century. The swords and armor making industry died after the arrival
of the British and imports
of iron
and steel from England displaced the iron and steel produced by highly
skilled people in India.
The Indian artisans' skills in several fields, indigenous technology
and workmanship all disappeared after the British took over the
control of vast Indian subcontinent.
Another highlight of the auction was a rare Indian bronze cannon cast at the Mysore king's royal foundry. This artifact from around 1790 AD was bought by an anonymous buyer at 313,250.00 pounds.
Among other items in the lot were a tent canopy that was sold for 121,250.00 pounds and a rare matchlock carbine that came under the hammer for 91,250.00
The auction fetched 15.4 million pounds, compared to the 1.2 million pounds earned at the first part of the Tipu Sultan auction of 2005.''
From....
Mangalorean News. dated 16th April,2013
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipu_Sultan
"Ring and sword of Tipu Sultan". Exploring themuseum. The British Museum. Retrieved 13 December 2013.
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