In 1925 Howard Carter entered the tomb of Tutankhamun unleashing a fictional curse, a photogenic boy-Pharaoh, and a new wave of Egyptomania upon the world. As beguiling as his iconic death mask is, it was not the only striking object in his tomb. Tucked among his burial wrappings were two exquisitely made daggers: one made entirely of gold and a second with a gold hilt and a metal blade. Unusually, the iron dagger is more valuable. This is because when King Tut was buried during the 18th Dynasty (around 1352 B.C.), the smelting technologies that allowed people to heat iron had yet to be discovered. Where did the dagger come from? It was a mystery that recent research may have solved.
The blade of the dagger is made of a kind of rust-resistant iron. The beautiful, decorated sheath and hilt reveal an extraordinary level of craftsmanship. Given that contemporaries of Tutankhamun could not make iron themselves the iron must come from somewhere else. And so, for some time archaeologists have assumed that the dagger had extraterrestrial origins. For scientists what that means is that blade was constructed out of a metallic meteorite that was discovered nearby. Even before the Iron Age began, circa 1200 B.C., humans had been pounding implements out of space iron. And, thus, it was reasonable to suppose that the “dagger from outer space” was constructed out of this valuable yet rare ancient resource.
Two recent studies, which utilize the most recent non-invasive technologies, confirm that the iron used in the blade comes from a meteorite. In an article published in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science a team of scholars based in Japan and Egypt argue that the meteoric blade was manufactured using low-temperature forging (<950 °C). The authorial team of the soon-to-be-released book Iron from Tutankhamun’s Tomb agree.
