The 14th-century BCE Pharaoh Tutankhamun’ s burial is the most famous in Egyptian history. Although the tomb was discovered in the early 20th century, it was only in 2016 that a team of scientists demonstrated that the object shown here was made of a substance more valued than gold: it is a dagger with an iron blade shaped from a meteorite.
Ancient Egyptians of the time called meteoric metal “iron from the sky,” and this makes sense, because several meteorites have been found in nearby areas of north Africa and because people probably didn’t smelt iron in Egypt until the first millennium BCE.
The elemental composition of King Tut’s blade — determined by using an x-ray fluorescence spectrometer — is iron, nickel, and cobalt in a specific ratio (more nickel and cobalt than earth-produced metals), which matches local meterorites.
Meteorites are pieces of space debris that have made their way to earth without disintegrating, and most of them come from asteroids thrown off their solar orbit between Mars and Jupiter. Scientists look at several things to figure out where a particular meteorite comes from: the ratio of metals, the date of the meteorite, whether they have chondrites (small round particles mostly of silicate), the density of the rock, whether the metal is igneous (which would mean that it was formed through volcanic activity — like Martian meteorites), and the isotopes (number of neutrons in an element).
ADDENDUM: scientists think they might have exactly one example of a meteorite from Mercury, which would be amazing. Named NWA7325, its composition of magnesium, aluminium, and calcium; its low iron content, and its oxygen isotope point in that direction. Geek out!
Source(s): @museum.wa.gov, Western Australian Museum, “How do we know where meteorites come from?”. @chemistryworld.com, Chemistry World, “Tutankhamun’s burial dagger is ‘extra-terrestrial’ in origin, Matthew Gunther, 5 June 2016. @history.com, “Researchers say King Tut’s dagger was made from a meteorite,” June 3, 2016, Sarah Pruitt.
