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hubie [soylentnews.org] writes:

One of the objects recovered from King Tutankhamun’s [nationalgeographic.com] mummy is a beautiful dagger with a rock crystal pommel, a golden hilt, and a blade hammered from iron. What makes this knife fascinating is that Egypt was very slow to enter the Iron Age due to their lack of iron ore deposits and iron-working technology. It had been suggested that they could have obtained the iron for this knife from meteorites, because though they didn't have the technology to melt it, they could hammer it into shape. New analysis [wiley.com] using X-ray fluorescence shows that, indeed, Tut's knife blade is composed of meteorite material [eos.org].

“No one ever really doubted the meteoritic origin of that dagger,” said Thilo Rehren, an archaeometallurgist at University College London, Qatar, in Doha, who was not involved with the study. “It was the logical thing to assume. The beauty of this [new] paper is that they’ve put it beyond doubt that this is meteoritic iron,” he added.

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Journal paper abstract [wiley.com]:

Scholars have long discussed the introduction and spread of iron metallurgy in different civilizations. The sporadic use of iron has been reported in the Eastern Mediterranean area from the late Neolithic period to the Bronze Age. Despite the rare existence of smelted iron, it is generally assumed that early iron objects were produced from meteoritic iron. Nevertheless, the methods of working the metal, its use, and diffusion are contentious issues compromised by lack of detailed analysis. Since its discovery in 1925, the meteoritic origin of the iron dagger blade from the sarcophagus of the ancient Egyptian King Tutankhamun (14th C. BCE) has been the subject of debate and previous analyses yielded controversial results. We show that the composition of the blade (Fe plus 10.8 wt% Ni and 0.58 wt% Co), accurately determined through portable x-ray fluorescence spectrometry, strongly supports its meteoritic origin. In agreement with recent results of metallographic analysis of ancient iron artifacts from Gerzeh, our study confirms that ancient Egyptians attributed great value to meteoritic iron for the production of precious objects. Moreover, the high manufacturing quality of Tutankhamun's dagger blade, in comparison with other simple-shaped meteoritic iron artifacts, suggests a significant mastery of ironworking in Tutankhamun's time.

Original Submission