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

It is said...

[Ashenkase]

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.

This is just a confirmation

[Anonymous Coward]

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'.

Re:This is just a confirmation

[blane.bramble]

Wouldn't that make the paper really heavy and inflexible?

Let's just get this out of the way...

[Ixtl]

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.

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.