If you forge weld layers of steel with varying content of carbon, what you're doing is producing mechanical damascus. The technique was known in a number of places throughout the world, and although one of the benefits is a product with a more aggressive edge than homogenous steel, as well as a high durability factor, the big benefit in times past when quality steel was not so easy to get hold of, was that by combining the varying qualities of material it permitted the cheaper, often locally produced material to be used to extend the quantity of the the more expensive material.
Javanese smiths used the same rationale of extending high quality material by adding low quality material to it, but they used a much more economical method by constructing the body of the blade from iron, and the cutting edge only from steel. This cutting edge was not always a wafer that went the full width of the blade, but in older blades was frequently only a thin wafer that ran around the circumference of the blade, as with Viking blades and Merovingian blades.
In my previous post I was talking about keris construction, but other old Javanese blades also can be found to use this same method of construction where only the edge is steel. Pretty much like some Scandinavian knives of today.
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