Hundreds of artistic objects lay in the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. And for some time it has been known that among them was a dagger with a blade made of meteoric iron. A working group led by Takafumi Matsui and Tomoko Arai from the Chiba Institute of Technology has now found out what type of Meteor the valuable accessory was made of and where the gold-decorated weapon originally came from. As the researchers write in the journal “Meteoritics & Planetary Science”, the dagger could have been a gift from an oriental ruler.
When Howard Carter discovered the tomb of the young pharaoh almost 100 years ago, he found no fewer than 5,400 grave goods: chariots, furniture, walking sticks, wooden figures and some very unusual objects made of iron. Since then, many researchers have been interested in the special finds, because when Tutankhamun ruled Egypt between 1336 and 1327 B.C. BC, the smelting of iron was still unknown there. In addition to some small-format iron tools with wooden handles, these pieces include a miniature headrest, an amulet and an elaborately crafted dagger.
Several working groups have now proven using X-ray fluorescence methods that the objects were made of meteoric iron. These included the archaeometrist Florian Ströbele and the metal restorers Christian Eckmann and Katja Broschat from the Roman-Germanic Central Museum in Mainz, who published their results in 2016 in the specialist journal »Metalla« and in 2018 as a book.
There is a lot of nickel in meteors
The most important indication of an extraterrestrial origin of the iron is the nickel content in the metal. If this is more than four percent by weight, it is very likely to be meteoric iron and not smelted iron. According to Ströbele’s analyses, Tutankhamun’s dagger contains 12.7 to 13.1 percent by weight nickel. This suggests that the blade was forged from meteoric iron. The analyzes by Matsui and Arai confirm the older results. Her team determined a nickel content of around 9.8 percent by weight. The researchers elicited even more information from the object, which was decorated with gold and rock crystal.