Noric steel
type of Celtic metal
Noric steel is a historical steel from Noricum, a kingdom located in modern Austria and Slovenia.
The proverbial hardness of Noric steel is expressed by Ovid: "...durior [...] ferro quod noricus excoquit ignis..." which roughly translates to "...harder than iron which Noric fire tempers [was Anaxarete towards the advances of Iphis]..." and it was widely used for the weapons of the Roman military after Noricum joined the Empire in 16 BC.
The iron ore was quarried at two mountains in modern Austria still called Erzberg "ore mountain" today, one at Hüttenberg, Carinthia and the other at Eisenerz, Styria, separated by c. 70 km (43 mi). The latter is the site of the modern Erzberg mine.
Buchwald identifies a sword of c. 300 BC found in Krenovica, Moravia as an early example of Noric steel due to a chemical composition consistent with Erzberg ore. A more recent sword, dating to c. 100 BC and found in Zemplin, eastern Slovakia, is of extraordinary length for the period (95 cm, 37 in) and carries a stamped Latin inscription (?V?TILICI?O), identified as a "fine sword of Noric steel" by Buchwald. A center of manufacture was at Magdalensberg.
“Noric steel” enters the record as type of Celtic metal. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Noric, steel and type can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 21, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q698431. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Noric steel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.