By the way, the signature is not engraved, it's signed, presumably by the craftsman who made the cymbal

I'm not up-to-date on my vintage Zildjians, but that cymbal will be worth a fair amount.

Yes, definitely a match ("saxophone" design. I did my reading). I came to the right place for information, thank you. I will be posting questions about other vintage instruments as well.

Zenstat is right that the inked cursive writing here is not a true signature, but as he said it says "K. Zildjian & Co". The term "signature" is a misnomer that stuck because it actually looks a lot like one. It was only fairly recently that I got the real story about this from Mehmet.

I intended craftsmen as a more generic term, meaning it was hand inscribed by someone on the staff rather than stenciled or stamped. But now I'm wondering how such a fine inscription was placed so clearly on a cymbal years ago. In other words how was it actually written, with no smearing, onto metal? I'm guessing any given cymbal was manufactured by several different people and inscribed by one of them. A production line certainly would be a more efficient process when turning out quantities of cymbals, but I'm also guessing that most of them could, and possibly did, occasionally manufacture a cymbal from ingot to finished product. For some, the term factory setting might conjure up some fairly modern-looking facility with an assembly line. From the photos I have seen, these factories look more like a cottage industry from the Renaissance, a bunch of guys sitting on stools in a minimalist room hand hammering bronze over a form.

I was told that is was Mikael himself who did this, or in his abscence it was the foreman. And it's written in Latian Script.

As for the ink, I've often wondered about that myself. It must have been a special type of ink that had an affinity for metal or maybe for bronze specifically. It was definitey not your run of the mill ink pen type ink though, because that only bubbles up and smears off.