Ancient Egyptian jewelry was occasionally made from meteorites 2,700 years before the people could form iron. A 5,000 year-old bead discovered in 1911 was constructed from a nickle-rich rock that fell from space, according to new research, ending an 85-tear-old mystery.
This bead, along with eight others like it, are the oldest iron items known from that country, dating to B.C.E. 3300. The artifacts were discovered in a cemetery in Gerzeh, 44 miles south of Cairo, in 1911. In 1928, it was determined that the beads contained nickle, which is often a sign of extraterrestrial origin. Although Egyptologists speculated, even back then, that the items may have come from space, other researchers of the time held the belief that the nickle came from early attempts at smelting. That question remained unanswered until now.
Diane Johnson, who studies meteorites at Open University, convinced that Manchester Museum in England to let her borrow one of the beads. Then, she studied the item using an electron microscope and peered inside the bead without damaging it by using x-rays, in a process called tomography. Physical examination of the inside of the metal was made available by small cracks in scratches in the surface of the artifact. Results of the study showed that the bead is composed of 30 percent nickle content, and that the metal displays a distinctive marking called a Widmanstatten pattern which indicative of metal formed in space.
"Meteorites have a unique microstructural and chemical fingerprint because they cooled incredibly slowly as they traveled through space. It was really interesting to find that fingerprint turn up in Egyptian artifacts," Philip Withers, of the University of Manchester, said.
This answers an old question in Egyptology - how could these ancient people have smelted iron 2,700 years before the development of smelting? The origin of this bead might also shed light on how ancient Egyptians viewed meteorites. Iron, though extremely rare in ancient Egypt, can occasionally be found in graves of the most powerful rulers, including King Tut. Egyptian legends held that the bones of their Gods were made from iron. Such items were thought to give the deceased a quick entrance into the afterlife.
"The sky was very important to the ancient Egyptians. Something that falls from the sky is going to be considered as a gift from the gods," Joyce Tyldesley, an Egyptologist at the University of Manchester, said. Tyldesley is a co-author of the paper announcing the finding.
Studying the bead showed that once the item was found, it was slowly cold-pounded into a tube-like shape for use in jewelry.
The study was published in the journal Meteortics & Planetary Science.
