Thread: The meteoritic origin of Tutankhamun's iron dagger blade

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This is just amazing...
Tutankhamun was buried with this dagger at his side..
We may now know what Tim Zowada was doing in one of his past lives...making daggers out of meteors for the Pharoh...




And the story behind it... The meteoritic origin of Tutankhamun's iron dagger blade - Comelli - 2016 - Meteoritics & Planetary Science - Wiley Online Library

Even though smelted iron was reasonably available at the time, albeit as a "luxury" item likely imported mostly from what is today Turkey, those iron meteorites still had some serious mojo in the eyes of the folks back then. The Egyptians had apparently been making ornaments and such out of them for a LONG time. From what I have read, they didn't switch over to iron for mass produced weapons until like 600 year later when they actually snagged the production technology from the Assyrians and they were pretty much done as a regional superpower by then. That period between 609 BC when the Assyrian Empire finally collapsed and 532 BC when Egypt was invaded and conquered by the Persians was kind of the last hurrah of Ancient Egypt which had existed in some form for at least 2500 years with a few breaks thrown in.

I read an article a while ago about a glass scarab they found and how pure the glass was. Thought it was interesting as I am a glazier by trade. They said that they could never have made a furnace hot enough to have made that scarab but later found that the scarab was made from glass that was a by product of a meteor hitting the sand in the desert. The heat produced by the meteor hitting the earth was the only way that glass could have been made back then. They started finding glass like that where meteors had crashed in the desert.
Pretty interesting

Gifts from the gods. It is hard for us modern folks to imagine such commonplace items as iron and clear glass being in the same class as gold and precious gemstones. You would probably know this. When would they have been able to do that and of work? In Roman times? I know that even as late as the 1400's, some of the techniques they used on Murano Island in Venice were super secret and super advanced and remained such for a good long time until some of them leaked out to the rest of Europe.

Originally Posted by nalob

I read an article a while ago about a glass scarab they found and how pure the glass was. Thought it was interesting as I am a glazier by trade. They said that they could never have made a furnace hot enough to have made that scarab but later found that the scarab was made from glass that was a by product of a meteor hitting the sand in the desert. The heat produced by the meteor hitting the earth was the only way that glass could have been made back then. They started finding glass like that where meteors had crashed in the desert.
Pretty interesting

At one time salt was worth more than gold too.

if you go out into the desert near some old volcanos you can find glass. Obsidian is what we call it. To get clear glass the impact or heat would have to involve very pure sand with nothing else nearby.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Tut's gem hints at space impact

This is just something I found from Google. But as I remember it now I think it was a special on national geographic or something. Also this piece was found in king tuts tomb

Apparently, people are still finding big chunks of glass in the Sahara. I saw a pic off one old Arab or Berber guy holding one about the size of a rather large grapefruit. On a related note I wonder how common clear fulgarite/lighting strike beach glass is? The Tut "glass jewel" is actually green fading to greenish-yellow but translucent.

Originally Posted by thebigspendur

At one time salt was worth more than gold too.

if you go out into the desert near some old volcanos you can find glass. Obsidian is what we call it. To get clear glass the impact or heat would have to involve very pure sand with nothing else nearby.