The catch, though, is that ambiguity between 'cymbal-maker' and 'bell-maker'. 'Zil's certainly existed before the surname existed, but what was a zil/zill? In English 'zill' still usually refers to something like a 'finger cymbal' or crotal, something with thicker bell-like walls and a bell-like sound and vibration. Unfortunately everything I've read about this is suggestive but maddeningly vague, for example p. 8 https://books.google.ie/books?redir_esc=y&id=Fl6Ie0_Rt8cC&q=... of the official history, Zildjian: A History of the Legendary Cymbal Makers by Jon Cohan (ISBN 9780793591558 ):
> Cymbals and bells had been made of bronze for centuries; the formula of eight parts of copper to two parts of tin was well known, but at some point Avedis stumbled upon a process of making a bronze alloy which held its strength and temper even when hammered and worked to a previously unimaginable thinness. The technique he discovered allowed cymbals to be made which had a distinct purity of tone that no other cymbal had ever achieved. The bronze alloy itself was no mystery, but the mixing process, the method of combining the metals in molten form to create the castings from which the cymbals was made, was a secret held only by Avedis. The resulting cymbals, said to contain traces of gold or silver, must have pleased the Sultan enough to commission Avedis to make cymbals for the Janissaries, the superior fighting forces of the Ottomans. The music of the Janissary bands relied profoundly on the striking of the cymbals, and Avedis became the official supplier to the Sultan.
Bells ring when you hit them, but cymbals have a thin bow which vibrates wildly and crashes when hit. It's a radically different sound, and apparently a radically different physical behaviour, though I don't understand the physics. So what I suspect happened was this: thick-walled, bell-like zils had long been manufactured in Constantinople, in various different sizes. But Avedis I's alloy turned out to be (again, I assume) the first (at least in the Middle East or Europe) to allow zils to be made thin enough to crash like a cymbal, not just ring like a bell. This is presumably what the talk about "distinct purity of tone that no other cymbal had ever achieved" actually refers to. Since making thin-bowed cymbals is apparently a very tricky procedure which involves subjecting the blank to high pressure and high temperature at the same time, it seems plausible that Avedis' accidental breakthrough in metallurgy was necessary to make this possible. (OTOH maybe his real breakthrough was in that cymbal-making process; maybe his special recipe for the blanks was in fact less necessary than he realised, even?) A leap from ringing bell-like zills to crashing cymbals would be the kind of thing which could be dramatic enough to get the sultan to notice and to hand out a title, a trade monopoly and a cash prize. If the crash was a new sound, it must have seemed absolutely otherworldly at the time. (However I don't know when China started making crashing cymbals, whether some crashing cymbals from China might have made it to Constantinople by the early 1600s, and so on.)
> Cymbals and bells had been made of bronze for centuries; the formula of eight parts of copper to two parts of tin was well known, but at some point Avedis stumbled upon a process of making a bronze alloy which held its strength and temper even when hammered and worked to a previously unimaginable thinness. The technique he discovered allowed cymbals to be made which had a distinct purity of tone that no other cymbal had ever achieved. The bronze alloy itself was no mystery, but the mixing process, the method of combining the metals in molten form to create the castings from which the cymbals was made, was a secret held only by Avedis. The resulting cymbals, said to contain traces of gold or silver, must have pleased the Sultan enough to commission Avedis to make cymbals for the Janissaries, the superior fighting forces of the Ottomans. The music of the Janissary bands relied profoundly on the striking of the cymbals, and Avedis became the official supplier to the Sultan.
Bells ring when you hit them, but cymbals have a thin bow which vibrates wildly and crashes when hit. It's a radically different sound, and apparently a radically different physical behaviour, though I don't understand the physics. So what I suspect happened was this: thick-walled, bell-like zils had long been manufactured in Constantinople, in various different sizes. But Avedis I's alloy turned out to be (again, I assume) the first (at least in the Middle East or Europe) to allow zils to be made thin enough to crash like a cymbal, not just ring like a bell. This is presumably what the talk about "distinct purity of tone that no other cymbal had ever achieved" actually refers to. Since making thin-bowed cymbals is apparently a very tricky procedure which involves subjecting the blank to high pressure and high temperature at the same time, it seems plausible that Avedis' accidental breakthrough in metallurgy was necessary to make this possible. (OTOH maybe his real breakthrough was in that cymbal-making process; maybe his special recipe for the blanks was in fact less necessary than he realised, even?) A leap from ringing bell-like zills to crashing cymbals would be the kind of thing which could be dramatic enough to get the sultan to notice and to hand out a title, a trade monopoly and a cash prize. If the crash was a new sound, it must have seemed absolutely otherworldly at the time. (However I don't know when China started making crashing cymbals, whether some crashing cymbals from China might have made it to Constantinople by the early 1600s, and so on.)