I make wootz blades. I have a large wootz dagger in progress and sold a wootz hunter this week. I get the billets from several of the wootz makers. There are a few Russian fellows who make a good wootz, but the champ (IMHO) is Greg Obach. He is at North Shore Forge and Ironworks. His site,
http://www.northshoreforge.com/index.html , has a good explanation on it.
In Persia and India ( all pretty much the same place at the ancient times), early steel production was at its height. They had smelting furnaces feed by stiff winds, and seat of the pants metallurgy that allowed great steels to be made at a time when they had no idea what actually made steel. The long charcoal smelting furnaces made for slow cooling, and the ores used provided the carbide formers to make a unique steel - named wootz. IT was sold by the traders throughout the Middle East, north into Russia, Scandinavia, and some into Europe. As all merchandizers do, they gave it a lot of hype and mystique, and a new name - damascus. This was not named after the city in Syria, but after a cloth made there. The cloth was properly called damascene, but the pattern was often just referred to as Damascus. It referred to the shimmery weave and play of light on the surface of the cloth.
In Russia, wootz is called Bulat. Bulat is the more modern form of wootz making. It is basically the same as ancient wootz, with the differences being mostly technical.
What wootz is, is carbide dendrites and needles suspended in a matrix of iron. The process involves heating the metal to a certain temperature and holding it there a long time while the carbide alloying dissolves. It is slowly cooled to encourage the growth. The carbon gets used up in forming the carbide needles and eventually there is nothing but iron left in the matrix. The needles are extremely hard. The iron is very soft. This makes a material that when sharpened has a toothy edge of the needles sticking out of a soft body. It will cut flesh very aggressively. It will take an enormous blow without breaking due to the toughness of the iron matrix. In a day when a swords abilities meant life or death, this truly was the ultimate weapon. There is no magic to a wootz blade. Wootz is not super hard, nor will it cut anvils in half. It is just a very good cutting steel that will bend but not break. One fallacy of modern movie hype is the sharpness of wootz. Having a micro-serrated edge, it cuts meat well, but cuts things like paper and cloth rather poorly. The movie stunt of an Arabian swordsman tossing a silk scarf in the air and cutting it in half with his wootz sword as it falls is pure bunk. A wootz edge would probably just grab the silk and not even damage it. A very sharp mono-steel blade could do it .... but not wootz.
The process of making wootz is very time consuming, often hundreds of hours, and the yield is small compared to the materials involved and the great amount of fuel/electricity used to run the ovens. Once made, the ingot has to be very carefully worked, as heating too much will re-dissolve the carbides and ruin the billet.
What is called Damascus today is pattern welded steel. This is a lamination of different steels that are folded and manipulated to get a desired pattern. The edge is usually micro-serrated, depending on the number of layers and the steels used. Modern Damascus steel is tough hen the right steels are chosen, and the HT is done right. It is not as sharp as a mono-steel in most cases. Good damascus of a higher layer count can rival a mono-steel edge in sharpness, but still will not cut paper and cloth as well.
The Japanese tamahagane steel is the other damascus like material. It is a mono-steel formed by a smelting process that yields a very pure steel. This is then folded many times, often into the millions of layers. This produces a surface pattern created by the slight oxide surfaces between the folds. This is called the hada. Tamahagane is very hard and can be quite brittle. Pure tamahagane is really only practical for a short blade. It is normally forged in a combination with lower carbon steels and even soft iron. These arrangements give the blade a very hard edge ( and in some cases surface) and a softer but tougher body. The simplest arrangement is san-mai, where the hard steel is clad with two sides of softer steel or iron. The more complex arrangements are five to seven pieces that can yield a nearly unbreakable sword with a very sharp and hard edge.
Note - unbreakable does not mean unbendable. A sword that will not bend will break and leave the user defenseless. A sword that will bend can be straightened - or used bent - and the user will stay alive ( maybe). Chips in the edge are fine as long as the sword survives. Also, the ability to slice scarves ... or anvils ... is not a desired attribute in battle. The ability to do massive damage to flesh and bone is. An aggressive cutting blade will do more damage. Another advantage of the micro-serrated edge was that in the time of most sword use, leather armor and thickly padded coats were the main defense against a sword blow. An aggressive cutting edge can hack through these semi-hard materials very well.
