Wootz: Persian or Indian?

[Rivkin]

Well, Shah Abbas I was quite specific (at least to me) that indian bulat is better than a persian one. This obviously does not contradict the universal recognition of persian work, which one can commonly encounter in XVI-XIXth century literature. I think we went through this in "practicality" of wootz thread.
I would agree though that on average persian wootz is more contrasty then the indian one.
Kara-Khorasan and Kara-Taban are really controversial topics since it is not clear what these termins refer to. In XIXth century one can very often encounter depictions that these are ultimate types of Bulat; they come either from Persia or from Cairo/Damascus area; they are not being produced anymore, and very few people even know how they look like (as in Anosov "On Bulats"). The most interesting story is that for example russian sources (all utlimately coming back to Anosov and his intellegance operations) insisted that these types of bulats where not produced at least since Timur's conquests.

Novadays it is often assumed that these bulats are very high contrast persian bulats. This might be true, but it might be not true as well.