Wootz ingots, where do they all come from?

[Jeff Pringle]

Here is a photo of a cast steel mill ball, forged out and with a ladder pattern put into the steel:

For scale, the ladders are spaced ~ 14mm (½”)

A little more technical background: the beautiful patterns on wootz blades come from slight variations in alloy that happen as the metal cools from liquid to solid, and the way those variations are altered during forging and heat treating.
Since this was a small ball that had cooled rapidly, it had both a smallish initial structure and not a lot of stretching to get to knife-sized bar – so the pattern is small scale, looks wootzy through a loupe but to the naked eye appears granular. With more forging/stretching/heat cycling, it could be made to look like small-scale wootz to the naked eye.

If you have a slowly cooled structure & not a lot of stretching, you get a pattern like this:

(my steel, ~1% Carbon)

And with more stretching, it gets more towards what we think of as ‘wootz’:

(my steel, 0.79% Carbon, lines are 2.54 mm 1”)

So if you had some 20th century industrial trash, you could pass it off as 18th century wootz, and even work it into wootzy looking blades if it was roughly the right alloy, cooled slowly enough and worked extensively enough.
The fake wootz that I saw in person appeared to be a different alloy than the mill balls I picked up in the desert, but getting the right alloy seems not to matter much in terms of naked-eye patterning.
Jeff