The tomb of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun was discovered and studied in 1922. Although a century has passed, the tomb and its contents continue to bring new surprises to modern science. One of them was a dagger found near the body of the deceased. A small blade belonging to the pharaoh is made of a material of extraterrestrial origin. And no, it has nothing to do with the production of representatives of foreign civilizations. But where did such material come from in Egypt?

Skystone Dagger

The history of metallurgy is more than a thousand years. It is difficult to say exactly when people first started using metals in the economy. And without a time machine, modern science is unlikely to determine the history of the development of metallurgy with an accuracy of at least a century. Unfortunately we have to talk about the millennium on this one. Apparently, humans learned to smelt metal from ore between approximately the 7th and 6th millennium BC. The first archaeological finds of molten copper belong to this period.

meteorite iron

At the same time, there is reason to believe that metals with limited processing were used much earlier by households and for jewellery. It seems that people learned about the properties of gold, copper, and iron around the 9th millennium BC. However, the “industrial” extraction of iron from rock would begin no earlier than 1200 BC. At the same time, in the 3rd millennium BC, during the heyday of the Bronze Age, many aristocratic military equipment and jewelry made of iron are found in the same Egypt. Where did they come from?

nice thing

Actually, this is extraterrestrial material or whatever it is called. “sky stone”. The fact is that before humans specialized in iron mining, the main source of this material was ingots lying on the earth’s surface! These were fragments of meteorites that fell to Earth long before the formation of the first human civilizations. Even in its most primitive crafting, meteoric iron was far more powerful than tools and weapons made of bone, stone, copper, or bronze. Of course, before the development of ore mining, items made from meteoric iron were quite rare, therefore they were very valuable and in every way sanctified. Only the richest people like the Egyptian pharaoh or the luckiest warriors could have it.

Made different things from meteorites

In fact, Tutankhamun’s dagger in the tomb, discovered in 1922, was made from the same meteorite iron. This was confirmed by X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy by staff of the Polytechnic University of Milan, the University of Pisa and the University of Cairo. The iron from which the dagger blade is made contains an unusually high percentage of nickel, phosphorus, cobalt, and some other alloying materials. Mixtures of these materials are not found in such quantities in the earth’s crust, suggesting that it was once a fragment of a meteorite.