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Iron In Egyptian Relics Came From Space

Posted by timothy on from the blaming-the-ancient-astronauts-for-everything dept.

ananyo writes "Researchers have found that a 5,000-year-old Egyptian trinket is made from a meteorite (abstract). The result explains how ancient Egyptians obtained iron millennia before the earliest evidence of iron smelting in the region, solving an enduring mystery. It also hints that they regarded meteorites highly as they began to develop their religion. The tube-shaped bead is one of nine found in 1911 in a cemetery at Gerzeh, around 70 kilometers south of Cairo. The cache dates from about 3,300 BC, making the beads the oldest known iron artifacts from Egypt. But the first evidence for iron smelting in ancient Egypt only appears in the archaeological record in the sixth century BC. Using scanning electron microscopy and computed tomography to analyze one of the beads, researchers found that the nickel content of this original metal was high — as much as 30% — suggesting that it did indeed come from a meteorite. Backing up this result, the team observed that the metal had a distinctive crystalline structure called a Widmanstätten pattern. This structure is found only in iron meteorites that cooled extremely slowly inside their parent asteroids as the Solar System was forming."

4 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. This is just a confirmation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Archaeologists have been theorizing about this for ages. In 1989 for instance they were speculating on meteorites being the source of iron in this paper.

    Significantly the word ‘Bja’ meaning iron in ancient Egyptian also meant the ‘material of which heaven was made'.

  2. Let's just get this out of the way... by Ixtl · · Score: 5, Informative

    ALIENS DID NOT BUILD THE FUCKING PYRAMIDS. Erich von Däniken is still an idiot. The Egyptians just made something out of this cool space rock they found. It does not mean that ancient astronauts killed JFK.

    1. Re:Let's just get this out of the way... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

      ALIENS DID NOT BUILD THE FUCKING PYRAMIDS.

      Technically, the Hebrew slaves built the pyramids. And as the Hebrews came from a far-away land, led there to escape famine by Joseph, who made them promise to take his bones with them when they returned to Canaan... you could say that the Hebrews were aliens in Egypt. As for the fucking part, there must have been quite a lot of that going on as well, because they went from being 12 brothers and their families to the 600,000 men, besides women and children, who left Egypt in the exodus. Therefore:

      Aliens Did Build the Pyramids
      Some Fucking Required to Generate Sufficient Numbers to Accomplish the Task

  3. Re:Iron by Guido+von+Guido+II · · Score: 3, Informative

    Two item: 1) They were smelting iron in the Lake Region of Africa (Rwanda) thousands of years ago. So it is possible that the Egyptian either knew how or they could of traded for it if they needed iron. 2) The Egyptian used iron from Meteor for sacred purpose. It was important to them that this iron came from the stars/heaven. The item was made of Meteor iron not because the Egyptian couldn't smelted iron but because it was important that the object be sacred.

    Iron smelting in Africa dates back to somewhere in the range of 1500-1750 BC (see Google books link and wikipedia link on the topic). However, per the Nature article the artifact in question dates back to about 3300 BC, over a thousand years earlier. So at the time point 1 is invalid (at least based on present evidence). Point 2 seems pretty likely, though.