King Tut's dagger blade made from meteorite, study confirms

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Weapon was made by hammering in 14th century BC, 600 years before iron smelting developed in Egypt

The gold mask of King Tutankhamun is seen alongside a dagger found in the wrapping of his mummy in a composite image. The dagger is now confirmed to be made of iron from a meteorite.

A famous dagger found in the wrapping of Egyptian King Tutankhamun's mummy was made with iron from a meteorite, a study confirms.

An analysis of the dagger's blade led by Daniela Comelli, a professor of materials science at the Polytechnic University of Milan in Italy, showed that it contains 10 per cent nickel and 0.6 per cent cobalt, the researchers report in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science.

 

The analysis was conducted using a technique called X-ray fluorescence, which identifies different elements from the characteristic colours of X-ray light they give off when hit with higher-energy X-rays. Then they compared the composition of the dagger's blade with that of 11 metallic meteorites and found it to be very similar.

 

The dagger has an iron blade and a gold handle and sheath. A new analysis of the iron shows that it has a similar composition to known metallic meteorites.

The dagger was found by archeologist Howard Carter in 1925, three years after he discovered King Tut's tomb. The dagger was in the wrapping surrounding the right thigh of the boy king's mummy.  It had a decorated gold handle with a pommel of rock crystal, and the iron blade was protected with a gold sheath decorated with a pattern of lilies on one side, feathers on the other, and a jackal's head, the researchers reported.

 

The dagger dates back to the 14th century BC and is one of very few iron artifacts ever found from the ancient Egyptian culture, which isn't thought to have developed iron smelting until the 8th century BC — later than neighbouring countries, Comelli told CBC News in an email.

'High manufacturing quality'

"The problem with iron working is related to its high melting point (1,538 C). Because of it, early smiths couldn't heat ore enough to extract iron and couldn't forge the iron into weapons," she wrote.

 

A 355-pound iron meteorite from Campo del Cielo crater field in Argentina. Iron meteorites typically contain about 10 per cent nickel and less than one per cent cobalt, like King Tut's dagger blade.

Earlier iron objects were typically ornamental or ceremonial and made of meteoritic iron that was considered more valuable than gold, the researchers wrote.

It was shaped by hammering, Comelli said. King Tut's dagger had been suspected to have been made with that type of iron, but it had not been confirmed.

 

"In this context, the high manufacturing quality of Tutankhamun's dagger blade is evidence of early successful iron smithing in the 14th C. BCE," the researchers wrote in their paper.

 

They added that the finding also provides insight into Egyptian descriptions of iron that appeared around 100 years later, which use the term "iron of the sky."

"The introduction of the new composite term suggests that the ancient Egyptians … were aware that these rare chunks of iron fell from the sky already in the 13th C. BCE," the authors wrote.

 

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King Tut was buried with a dagger made of an iron that literally came from space, says a new study into the composition of the iron blade from the sarcophagus of the boy king.

 

Using non-invasive, portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometry, a team of Italian and Egyptian researchers confirmed that the iron of the dagger placed on the right thigh of King Tut's mummified body a has meteoric origin.

 

The team, which include researchers from Milan Polytechnic, Pisa University and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, detailed their results in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science.

 

The weapon, now on display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, was described in 1925 by Howard Carter, who three years before had discovered the treasure-packed tomb, as "a highly ornamented gold dagger with crystal knob."

 

Made of non-rusted, homogeneous metal, the finely manufactured blade features a decorated gold handle. It is completed by a gold sheath garnished with a floral lily motif on one side and with a feathers pattern on the other side, terminating with a jackal's head.

 

Now dramatic technological improvements have allowed the researchers to determine the composition of the blade.

"Meteoric iron is clearly indicated by the presence of a high percentages of nickel," main author Daniela Comelli, at the department of Physics of Milan Polytechnic, told Discovery News.

 

Indeed, iron meteorites are mostly made of iron and nickel, with minor quantities of cobalt, phosphorus , sulfur and carbon.

While artifacts produced with iron ore quarrying display 4 percent of nickel at most, the iron blade of King Tut's dagger was found to contain nearly 11 percent of nickel.

 

Further confirmation of the blade's meteoric origin came from cobalt traces.

 

"The nickel and cobalt ratio in the dagger blade is consistent with that of iron meteorites that have preserved the primitive chondritic ratio during planetary differentiation in the early solar system," Comelli said.

 

Comelli and colleagues also investigated the possible source of the iron blade.

 

"We took into consideration all meteorites found within an area of 2,000 km in radius centered in the Red Sea, and we ended up with 20 iron meteorites," Comelli said.

 

"Only one, named Kharga, turned out to have nickel and cobalt contents which are possibly consistent with the composition of the blade," she added.

 

The meteorite fragment was found in 2000 on a limestone plateau at Mersa Matruh, a seaport some 150 miles west of Alexandria.

 

The study shows the ancient Egyptians attributed great value to meteoritic iron for the production of precious objects, possibly perceiving those chunks of iron falling from the sky as a divine message.

 

The most ancient Egyptian iron artifacts, nine small beads excavated from a cemetery along the west bank of the Nile tomb in Gerzeh and dated about 3200 BC, are also made from meteoritic iron hammered into thin sheets.

 

"It would be very interesting to analyze more pre-Iron Age artifacts, such as other iron objects found in King Tut's tomb. We could gain precious insights into metal working technologies in ancient Egypt and the Mediterranean," Comelli said.

 

She noted that the high quality of King Tut's dagger blade shows that iron smithing was successful already in the 14th century B.C.

 

The dagger blade is not the only celestial object found in the boy king's tomb. His pectoral, or necklace, features an amulet scarab which is not "greenish-yellow chalcedony," as Carter had noted, but Libyan desert silica glass.

 

The glass was produced by the impact on the sand of a meteorite or comet. Such natural glass exists only in the remote and inhospitable Great Sand Sea of Egypt — the Western Desert. In order to produce the scarab, the ancient Egyptians would have had to trek across 500 desert miles.

 

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