Wootz ingots, where do they all come from?

[Jeff Pringle]

I’m sure Ric has something to say about these, too, but since they are a pet peeve of mine I’ll recap a couple reasons from earlier in the thread - you can be confident these are not wootz, modern or ancient.
1. They do not look like ingots of metal that were melted in small crucibles, those are shaped like the bottom of a crucible on one side, and like solidified liquid on the other. The shape of the crucible can differ, but if you look at the image below I think you will see what I mean – that is a sectioned ingot of 19th century Indian wootz that shows up in Smith’s “The History of Metallography” and Figiel’s book.
2. All steels solidify with a dendritic structure, not just wootz, so that is irrelevant but often comes up because people first hear of crystalline dendrites in steel via wootz.
3. Despite what he says in on his page, the chemistry of historic wootz is very consistent, the amounts of the various elements tend to vary by just tenths of a percent. Here’s a table that shows just how far out of line his product is - numbers that are more than a few tenths of a percent off are very significant, and in this case they point directly away from wootz.