Iron In Egyptian Relics Came From Space 119
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."
Amazing (Score:3, Insightful)
The stone dropped from millions of miles away in the Solar System onto the land of a civilization that was relatively advanced for the time, so they developed it into jewelry that somehow survived 5,000 years before tourists arrived to deface it with grafitti.
In the grand scheme of things (Score:4, Insightful)
The idea that a civilization would use a rock that fell from space to make some trinkets doesn't seem too earth shaking to me.
Giorgio Tsoukalos asks... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Let's just get this out of the way... (Score:0, Insightful)
No, he is totally a a sub-terrestrial from the darkest depths of the earths blackened heart.
Re:Giorgio Tsoukalos asks... (Score:4, Insightful)