ahem!
i did say i was away from my notes, and so reliant on memory, which is always a dangerous thing
however, i am not quite as wrong as jens and james allen would have me believe (at least in memory).
i realised a while back that if you find a scrap of historically important information, you cannot rely on the translation and must always look to source and let your study start from there. it seems this is a good example.
jens quotes from allen -
“This steel is sold in pieces as large as our one-sou loaves and in order to know that it is good and that there is no fraud involved, they cut it in two, each fragment being enough for one sabre”.
in his bibliography, james allen mentions voyages en perse (tavernier reprinted 1970).
the original was written in 1676, and i wonder if allens version was a reprint of the original, or a redressed version (of which there have been many).
the reason i make a point of this, is because i found my notes on it and this was what i have -
'' the steel susceptible od being damasked comes from the kingdom of golconda; it is met with in commerce in lumps about the size of a half-penny cake: they are cut in two, in order to see whether they are of good quality, and each makes half the blade of a sabre,''
so jens' version says a blade is made from half a cake, and mine says its made from the two halves.
unfortunately, my source doesnt cite its original reference, but was written in 1832 so it uses a much earlier version of taverniers text.
either could be right, or both could be wrong. it does, however, make me question even more any translated sources. maybe both are worng, if the original is translated again (maybe we'll fing it was 3-4 halves, like i originally remembered, but i think i may have been a fisherman in a previous life and so prone to slight exaggeration!!)
here's another account of wootz from 1837, which mentions the weight.
''in the examination of various specimens of wootz, i found one large cake of about 2.5 pounds weight, from cutch, which on cutting and working, not only furnished excellent steel, capable of being hardened and tempered without much difficulty, but exhibited the damascus figure, both in the cake itself, and when drawn out by forging into a bar; i also found that this bar could be doubled down on itself four times whilst red hot, and then welded perfectly together. several specimens from salem, weighing about one pound each, gave only slight indications of a pattern, the crystals being very small, and the stell inferior in quality.''