King Tutankhamun’s Dagger Has Extraterrestrial Origins

A dagger found in the tomb of Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun (Tut) was reportedly made with iron from a meteorite. A new analysis conducted by Italian and Egyptian researchers revealed the actual composition of the metal.

In 1922 archaeologists Howard Carter and George Herbert discovered the intact tomb of the teenage King Tut, who was mummified more than 3,300 years ago. Two blades, one made from gold and another with iron, were found inside the wrapping of the young pharaoh. The iron dagger, which had a gold handle and was enclosed within a rock crystal pommel sheath decorated with lily and jackal designs, has baffled researchers since its discovery within the sarcophagus. The metal of the blade had not rusted and, more particularly, ironwork was rarely done in Ancient Egypt, and this fact led to the puzzle around it.  

Recently an international team of researchers from Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Pisa University and Milan Polytechnic studied the dagger's metal with an x-ray fluorescence spectrometer to find its chemical composition. The analysis, which incidentally is published in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science, detected a high content of nickel and cobalt that "strongly suggests an extraterrestrial origin". The team compared the chemical composition of the blade with the known meteorites that had struck earth within 2,000 kilometers of area around Egypt's Red Sea coast, and found similarity with one meteorite. The meteorite, called Kharga, was found to be located 240 kilometers west of Alexandria, at Mersa Matruh which is a seaport city and was known as Amunia during the age of Alexander the Great, in the fourth century BC.

"As the only two valuable iron artifacts from ancient Egypt so far accurately analyzed are of meteoritic origin, we suggest that ancient Egyptians attributed great value to meteoritic iron for the production of fine ornamental or ceremonial objects," said the researching team. "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 century BCE, anticipating Western culture by more than two millennia". Interestingly, the ancient term for iron can literally be translated into iron of the sky and the ancient Egyptians revered celestial objects that fell from the sky as gifts from the gods, as per the researchers.