The swords of Adichanallur 

Look for a showcase displaying swords and iron artefacts in the Adichanallur Gallery. Play this story there.

Take a look at these iron tools found in Adichanallur. They are quite special. You may have heard of Damascus steel swords. They were extremely prized in the first millennium, and were known for their toughness and resistance to shattering. The swords were made in Damascus, and hence the name. But the steel ingots for these swords went from India - specifically from Adichanallur and later from Sri Lanka. It was called Wootz steel and around 500 BCE, it was produced in Kodumanal near Erode. Wootz is a word that is most probably derived from the Tamil word ‘Urukku’. This steel had a very high carbon content, which gave it great strength. Over time, the technique of making this steel was forgotten and today, we don’t know exactly how it was made with the tools available back then. For its time, it was technologically very advanced. It meant that the metallurgists from these early settlements could build kilns that could generate the high temperatures that such smelting required.

The biggest revelation from all the recent excavations along the Porunai and Vaigai rivers is that not only were these settlements really, really old, but that they were also fairly advanced as a society.

And it wasn’t just their steel. The copper artefacts discovered inside burial urns at Adichanallur were found to contain arsenic – an additive used by smelters to reduce brittleness. For a long time, this practice was considered unique to the Indus valley in India.

On the other side of this bay, you can see a number of beads that were excavated from these sites. At Keeladi, beads made of carnelian, agate, glass and other colourful minerals were found in unusually large quantities at single sites. That suggests that Keeladi might have had some kind of bead warehouse or market from where people bought and sold beads. Arikamedu, near Pondicherry was another ancient Tamil port town that had trade ties with Rome. Numerous items were exported and many things came in from Rome too. You can also see the fragments of an amphora displayed in this gallery.