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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."
It was the lizard men!
"Next on Ancient Aliens..." in 3... 2... 1...
That only the Egyptian women would search for and collect meteorites for such jewellery.
These "Iron Maidens" would run to the hills, locate a meteorite, perform a customary dance of death and return to their camps 2 minutes to midnight due to a widespread fear of the dark.
...where did they get all that naquadah?
The stone dropped from millions of miles away in the Solar System onto the land of a civilization that was relatively advanced for the time, so they developed it into jewelry that somehow survived 5,000 years before tourists arrived to deface it with grafitti.
The Egyptians already made use of glass from an impact:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHEbg2b5wYs
Everthing on Earth came from space.
The idea that a civilization would use a rock that fell from space to make some trinkets doesn't seem too earth shaking to me.
"I'm not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens"
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
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'.
Who's the pyramidiots now.
Did all these rocks fall from the sky, maybe, but, could some have been brought by ancient astronauts, as gifts to the native population?
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
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.
everything on Earth came from space...
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!
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
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.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Doesn't the greek word for iron mean something like "came from the sky"? I've once thought about why the modern iron industry is often called siderurgy, and came across a few references for the use of iron from meteorites, as early technology wasn't sufficient to extract it from the ore.
Then the Egyptians must have been *real* hicks....
Excerpt:
The Hittites appear to be the first to understand the production of iron from its ores and regard it highly in their society. They began to smelt iron between 1500 and 1200 BC and the practice spread to the rest of the Near East after their empire fell in 1180 BC.[37] The subsequent period is called the Iron Age. Iron smelting, and thus the Iron Age, reached Europe two hundred years later and arrived in Zimbabwe, Africa by the 8th century.
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- wikipedia, iron, history