Apparently the Romans quarried iron ore from Erzberg and produced high quality steel from it. It said in the article that a sword was found in Moravia from about 300 BC, and another in Slovakia from 100 BC. Do you guys think it was actually steel or a "steely iron" of sorts?

Yes, it was proper steel. The celtic tribes in the region were producing swords at least as good as anything made at the end of the Middle Ages. The best papers on the subject are in German. Radomir Pleiner's The Celtic Sword might be easier to find. IIRC Bishop and Coulston has some analyses of several Roman blades.

Thanks Dan, and I can read German so I guess I will finally get to use it again.

I think generally speaking, with Noricum and that region, you are actually talking about mostly Pannonians and Illyrians, not Celts, though the two tend to get conflated quite a bit and these days in Academia the latter term isn't even used. It's possible Noricum was a federation which included both "Celtic" and Illyrian tribes, with the Celtic tribes politically dominant but in the demographic minority.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noricum#Area_and_population

[ Linked Image ]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pannonians#Pannonian_tribes

The Illyrians do seem to be a somewhat distinct, if overlapping culture, and a lot of "Celtic" artifacts you see in museums and so on are actually Illyrian.


J

For as far as I know Noric steel is very scares. Most of the Scandinavian swords are made in Solingen in Germania. But Noric steel exist, mostly it’s won out of peat, but you have to melt a lot of peat to get some ore of it.