Iron In Egyptian Relics Came From Space

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."

Comments

Doesn't everything come from space?

[schwit1]

The Egyptians already made use of glass from an impact:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHEbg2b5wYs

Re:Giorgio Tsoukalos asks...

[mveloso]

Occam's Razor is a cheap parlor trick used by the mentally lazy to dismiss, well, everything.

If you said "billions and billions of random events occurred to create anti-entropic self-organizing entities" people would say "well, Occam's Razor says no." And yet here we are.

Re:regarded meteorites highly as religion develope

[K. S. Kyosuke]

And you see what religion does to people. A single core drill would be able to resolve the issue. But no, it's supposed to be holy, not holey! We can't do that!

Re:Amazing

[ElectricTurtle]

Or perhaps you need to. One of the most disruptive periods socially and economically in ancient Egypt was the pharaoh Akhenaten's foray into monotheism (one of the first, if not the first) with Atenism. Hoards of resources were wasted on mammoth projects which were abandoned almost immediately after Akhenaten's death, and it would take generations to heal the damage of the schism which ultimately unseated the dynasty. Religion in Egypt has catalyzed both its greatest successes and failures, and it would behoove a wise student of history to study both and contrast them.

Really old story

[GodfatherofSoul]

I saw this in a documentary maybe 10 years ago. I couldn't tell enough from the article to know what was new besides being a study on one specific trinket.

Slightly OT, but one of the theories posited in Carl Sagan's Comet was that magic swords were historically crafted from meteorites composed of a higher grade of iron than could be smelted/mine/whatever at the time. The magic came from how much better they performed in battle and having been dropped to earth from the heavens.