Posted on 07/11/2011 8:15:58 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
The Nanjing Belt was discovered in a tomb in 1952 around a skeleton. The tomb and the body dated to the Jin Dynasty that brings us back to the early centuries A.D (265-420) and luckily the name of the occupant was established through an inscription. He was one Zhou Chou (obit 297) who died fighting, of all people, the Tibetans.
So far so easy: belts and even britches are common in graves around the world from the mysterious dragon buckles of Late Roman mercenaries to the ceremonial belts of the Lords of the Maya. In fact, the problems only really began when the boffins got the belt off Zhou and back into a laboratory.
The belt included 'about' (?) twenty pieces of metal -- which had presumably been attached to the now rotted leather -- and four of these were made of almost pure aluminium. Aluminium it will be remembered does not appear alone in nature. It took Europeans till the early nineteenth century to understand how to isolate this useful substance and even then the aluminium that issued was far from pure.
Chinese historians were, understandably, bemused and something of a civil war broke out, not helped by the fact that the Cultural Revolution was on the horizon. If there was a resolution though before Mao's guillotine came down it was that four pieces were, indeed, aluminium. The problem then was not metallurgical but rather archaeological: were they Jin Dynasty or had they been placed in the tomb in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries?
(Excerpt) Read more at strangehistory.net ...
sounds like the result will be beautiful and practical. I go to the blade show in Atlanta every year and there are some spectacular pieces of art on display
Please tell me more about this show.
When?
Web site?
I might go too..... I need to find some one to buy it when finished.
Bristol, VA. Some times you cannot escape...
Family from there - like my grandparents. For 15 generations, or some such.
Keeps coming up in conversation.
Metallurgist have been able to duplicate the look of Damascus Steel but have they duplicated the properties. I am not sure. As of some of the reading I was doing in knife collector magazines 10 years ago they had not.
Regardless of that even if they have consider how many hundreds of years it has take to duplicate a steel making process that was developed about 300 BC. That is before the use of coal.
Yes, an error in minutia can be brutal around here.
Sorry for piling on. I hadn’t read far enough along the thread to see the other wise guys waving their hands in the air and yelling “I know! I know!”
“Teenage time travelers.
aluminum nodules”
Too rare by half to be making belts out of. Besides, it interferes with my pet theory, therefore it can not be true.
Any more contentiousness from you and I’ll be forced to sue for improper scientific impingement upon my grant money flow.
http://www.bladeshow.com/ehome/index.php?eventid=21409&tabid=30566&
http://www.internetbusinesslinks.net/knifemakingsuppliers.pdf
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