June 3, 2025 • 55 mins
Before the dawn of the iron age, ancient humans had but one source of workable iron for their artifacts and weapons: meteorites. In this classic and very-metal episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss various examples of meteoric metal artifacts, including several precious sky-weapons of antiquity. (originally published 5/7/2024)
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb. We're out this week, so we have
some episodes from the vault here for you. This is
going to be part one of our series on meteoric
metal and alien iron. This one originally published five seven,
twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
And I'm Joe McCormick. And today on Stuff to Blow
Your Mind, we wanted to kick off a series of
episodes on tools, blades, weapons, artifacts, ceremonial ornaments, and various
things things made by humans out of materials that came
from outer space, particularly stuff made from mediorite iron.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Yeah. So, whether you've listened to our show before or not,
you're probably familiar with the three age system of classifying
ancient civilizations, defining them by their material and the technological
level of advancement for that given civilization. And this is
not without its complexity and even its controversy, as we'll
get into, but it divides things into the Stone Age,
(01:22):
the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age. In this series
of episodes, from stuff to blow your mind. We're going
to be dealing predominantly with the age of bronze, typified
by its bronze production and lasting very roughly, and these
dates are not solid for all places and civilizations. A
strong caveat there from somewhere around thirty three hundred to
(01:44):
twelve hundred BCE. So we're dealing with a very amorphous
period of time here, and the transference into the Age
of Iron is much the same. But before we jump
into the key example that we're going to be looking
at in this episode, I just wanted to share a
couple of quotes to perhaps help put this time frame
in perspective and even cast a different light on civilization
(02:07):
before the widespread production and use of iron. Both of
these are from books that deal more specifically with Chinese
technology and Chinese history, but I believe some of the
takeaways from both of these quotes are just appliable across
the board. So this first one is a quote from
John Key in his book A History of China. He writes, quote, Indeed,
(02:31):
bronze came to occupy much the same position in ancient
China as stone in the contemporary civilization of Egypt or
later those of Iran, Persia and Greece. Enormous effort was
devoted to producing bronzewere highly sophisticated ideas were expressed through it.
Some of the earliest inscriptions were found on it, and
its durability has ensured that plentiful examples have survived. And
(02:55):
this other quote is from Joseph Needham, whose work we've
discussed in the show before, from Science and Society in
Ancient China quote, it looks as if the earliest kings
or feudal princes recognized bronze metallurgy to be the basis
of feudal power over the Neolithic peasantry because of the
superior arms which it rendered possible, and therefore they appropriated
(03:17):
that the technique of metalworking. So what I like about
these two quotes is I think they helped drive home
that bronze was not only a material for tools, but
a material through which culture was made manifest, as well
as a source of power, both in physical weaponry and
even just as an idea. And while these examples, again
are both from texts that focus exclusively on Chinese history,
(03:38):
I think you can sort of get a broader take
home from them, Like I said earlier, So on top
of that, I would say, also, I think it's essential
to keep in mind that the Bronze age was far
from just a period between or a precursor to something
better or more advanced. It was a time of great
technological and cultural advancement. It was the age of the
wheel of irrigation, writing systems, enhanced weaponry, and much more.
(04:03):
And it's not merely the time before iron. It is
the time that gave birth to iron technology as well well.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
And I think that can really be driven home in
the fact that iron is not even necessarily for all
uses a superior metal to bronze. Bronze could be considered
materially superior in some ways. It's just that iron, once
you have the technology to smelt it and then work
it in the high temperatures you need, it is easier
(04:32):
to produce at mass scales and cheaper.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Yeah, I mean, there's definitely from what I've read, there's
definitely a period of time in which your early smelted
iron tools, weapons, what have you are not going to
be as durable and as highly efficient as the high
end bronze weapons and tools of that same time period.
Speaker 4 (04:53):
But you can make more of them.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
Right, right, But eventually, of course iron comes to.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
Dominate, especially in the form of steel.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Yes, I know some will say steel isn't strong, flesh
is strong, YadA, YadA, YadA, but steel's pretty strong. Well.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
I do want to start within one of the regional
Bronze ages to start off today's episode by looking at
a very intriguing and mysterious artifact from ancient Egypt. This
is a dagger from the stars found buried alongside the
pharaoh tutin Common. So the tomb of the eighteenth dynasty
(05:28):
Egyptian pharaoh tutin Common was uncovered by the British archaeologist
Howard Carter and his team in nineteen twenty two. Tuton
Common reigned from thirteen sixty one to thirteen fifty two BCE,
becoming king around the age of nine or so, unruling
until his early death around the age of eighteen. Tutin
(05:50):
Common is thought to have been a son of the
pharaoh Akinaten, though from what I understand this relationship is
not totally certain. There is a DNA relation to another
mummy that has been found that is presumed to be Acinatin,
but it's not known for sure. Acintin, his likely father,
was notable for trying to replace the traditional polytheistic religion
(06:12):
of Egypt with a it's debatable how to characterize this,
but a monotheistic or monolteristic or perhaps henotheistic, whatever you
call it, focus on a single god, an emphasis of
one God above all the others from the Egyptian pantheon,
and that is the solar deity Aughtan, which took the
form of the disk of the Sun. We've talked about
(06:34):
that sort of attempt to go one God early in
Egypt before, but this shift did not last long after
Acinatin's death, and one of Tutonkommon's main accomplishments as pharaoh
seems to have been the restoration of the old polytheistic cults.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Yeah, the rejection of new coke and the reacceptance of
old coke.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
Play in the hits getting the old gang together. So
Tummons Tomb was considered a very special discovery in the
twentieth century because even though it had been partially looted
at least twice shortly after it was sealed, it was
still considered relatively intact compared to other tombs. So many
of the original grave goods were still in place, and
(07:18):
this was not really the case at all for most
of the other royal tombs of ancient Egypt. They were
mostly scoured by grave robbers thousands of years ago. This
is sometimes misstated as saying that that tuten Coommon's Tune
tomb had never been disturbed, and that's not true. It
was robbed long ago like all the rest of them,
it just didn't get robbed as much. And some have
(07:39):
speculated that Tuten Common's tomb was relatively well preserved because
the entrance got covered up by stuff and people pretty
quickly forgot where it was. And so when this tomb
was rediscovered in the twentieth century, it contained a wealth
of treasures and a beautiful, wonderful glimpse into the past.
So for a taste of the variety of objects found
(08:01):
in the tomb, I just wanted to read directly from
the diary entry of Howard Carter describing the day of
November twenty sixth, nineteen twenty two, when his team finally
cleared away the last of the rubble from the passageway
into the tomb and got the first look inside. So
Carter writes, quote, it was some time before one could see.
The hot air escaping caused the candle to flicker, But
(08:24):
as soon as one's eyes became accustomed to the glimmer
of light, the interior of the chamber gradually loomed before one,
with its strange and wonderful medley of extraordinary and beautiful
objects heaped upon one another. There was naturally short suspense
for those present who could not see. When Lord Carnivon
said to me, can you see anything? I replied to him, yes,
(08:46):
it is wonderful. I then, with precaution, made the whole
sufficiently large for both of us to see. With the
light of an electric torch as well as an additional candle,
we looked in. Our sensations and astonishment are difficult to describe,
as the better light revealed to us the marvelous collection
of treasures. Two strange ebony black effigies of a king,
(09:07):
gold sandaled bearing staff and mace loomed out from the
cloak of darkness. Gilded couches in strange forms lion headed,
hathor headed, and beast infernal, exquisitely painted inlaid and ornamental caskets, flowers,
alabaster vases, some beautifully executed of lotus and papyrus device,
(09:29):
strange black shrines with a gilded monster snake appearing from within,
quite ordinary looking white chests, finely carved chairs, a golden
inlaid throne, a heap of large, curious white oviform boxes
beneath our very eyes on the threshold, a lovely lodiform
wishing cup in translucent alabaster, stools of all shapes and
(09:51):
design of both common and rare materials. And lastly, a
confusion of overturned parts of chariots glinting with gold, peering
from amongst which was a mannequin, the first impression of
which suggested the property room of an opera of a
vanished civilization. Our sensations were bewildering and full of strange emotion.
(10:13):
We questioned one another as to the meaning of it all.
Was it a tomb or merely a cash A sealed
doorway between the two sentinel statues proved there was more beyond,
and with the numerous cartouches bearing the name of Touton
common on most of the objects before us, there was
little doubt that there behind was the grave of that pharaoh.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
Yeah, yeah, I like the atmosphere. He captures here in
this description.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
One of my favorite things is the description of the
disassembled parts of the chariot all there piled.
Speaker 4 (10:45):
Up in the tomb.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
Anyway, documenting the contents of the tomb went on for
years after the initial discovery, and one of the objects
found later, this was in nineteen twenty five. This was
buried right alone along with the pharaoh's body. One of
these artifacts, it was a beautiful dagger. In fact, there
were two daggers buried with toot and common, one made
(11:09):
of gold and another made of iron. And ironically it's
the iron dagger that I would like to focus on,
so Rob, I've got some pictures for you to look
at here, sort of like with different sides of the
dagger facing and then different types of illumination. But the
iron dagger is a little over a foot long, and
(11:30):
it was found not only within the king's tomb, but
with his mummified remains inside the inner coffin, and in fact,
not only in the inner coffin, but literally inside the
king's wrappings, so wrapped up with him up against his thigh,
the gold dagger was apparently on his abdomen.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
Yeah, it's a very splendid looking weapon, and there are
no shortage of images of this, you can easily look
up online.
Speaker 3 (11:55):
So the knife has a handle made out of gold
with a crystal knob on the end, sort of very
smooth and rounded off crystal knob, and a golden sheath
decorated with images of on one part a repeating feather pattern.
There are flowers I think maybe supposed to be lilli's,
and there's also a jackal's head. And surprisingly, this dagger
(12:18):
made out of iron remained relatively rust free for all
these centuries. Though it does have blemishes, they're not rust Instead,
it has black spots in the middle that to me
almost look like lunar maria.
Speaker 4 (12:30):
They're these sort.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
Of you know, strange, beautiful little black depressions that have
almost geographical looking edges.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (12:39):
Yeah, So this.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
Dagger made of iron was instantly quite interesting to experts
because it was made of iron. Toot In Common lived
at a time when iron artifacts were quite rare in Egypt,
not completely non existent, but precious and few. We associate
iron today with raw utility. I think of like just
(13:01):
stacks of rebar and stuff, you know, Like we think
of its hardness and toughness and its ready availability. So,
of course iron and steel, steel being a product of iron,
are thought of as useful for making durable workaday tools
machine parts, in architecture, for making bridges and framing buildings
and so forth. But in Tutan Commons Egypt, the evidence
(13:25):
indicates that the rare iron artifacts that did exist were
treated instead as sacred, decorative and ceremonial items, more like
we treat gold and silver today, except perhaps even more precious. Now,
why would something as cheap, abundant and mundane as iron
(13:45):
be treated as precious sacred material. It seems to be
because at the time iron was anything but abundant and mundane.
The mundane iron that we think of today is extracted
from iron ore that we mine out of the ground,
and then we extract in pure metallic form from its
ore form in extremely hot furnaces. And while there were
(14:09):
plenty of iron ore deposits in the deserts of Egypt,
there was not a widespread industry that was able to
separate pure metallic iron from its ore in the region
until several hundred years later. Now, why was iron harder
to work with and extract than other metals such as
the copper tin alloy that forms the basis of ancient bronze.
(14:32):
I think that there's sort of a more complicated answer
and a sort of a simpler answer, And the simpler
answer is basically higher melting point, Like it takes more
energy to extract iron from its ore, and it takes
more heat to make it malleable and workable once it
is extracted.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Yeah, yeah, I remember we went into some of this
back when we did an episode on the One Ring
of the Lord of the Rings, and you know, talking
about what kind of metals would would melt or not
melt the constraints that are laid out in the text.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
However, there was one source of pure or to some
degree pure metallic iron available before the smelting process was developed,
and that source of metallic iron was meteorites, chunks of
iron that fell from space. So experts have for a
(15:23):
long time suggested that maybe King Tut's dagger, and not
just his dagger, but other iron artifacts that were also
found within the tomb and other iron artifacts from ancient
Egypt from this period and before, were in fact meteoric
in origin, that they were hammered out of iron that
fell to Earth from the sky.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
So your exploitive headline here, of course, is ancient Egyptian
to use space weapons, and I've seen various indulgences of
that sort of thing. But I mean, yeah, you're not
too far off the mark with that, even if you
are implying things that are not true as well. I've
even seen alien weapons mentioned before.
Speaker 3 (16:04):
Now before those of you get too excited, no this,
this is not ancient alien stuff.
Speaker 4 (16:09):
No, this would be.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
This does not need to be a gift from aliens
that came from above, because meteorites still land on Earth today.
They land naturally. People can find them.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Right right, And that of course is especially true if
you if in one or two situations with meteorites, is
it dramatic in its entry or do you have an
environment in which objects like this are easy to find,
such as a desert. So you will find various desert
environments where there is a long tradition of gathering such
(16:41):
meteorites because they stand out more. But you know, even
if you see or think you see something fall, you
can also get into trouble trying to to find what
fell from the sky. We've talked about the the phenomena
of star jelly before. This is where someone sees a
shooting star or things of meteorite fallen in their general
(17:01):
vicinity and they go out into the woods and they
start poking around. Do they find something that they think
looks weird? And it may be like just some sort
of slimy substance in the forest. It's a slimy substance
that was always there or is frequently there, but they
just never went out and poked it and looked for
it before. So ultimately you have to know what you're doing.
But a desert environment can be a real gift to
(17:22):
the meteorite.
Speaker 4 (17:23):
Hunter, that's right.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
So what is a meteorite, Well, a meteorite is, in short,
any solid natural object that falls from space through our
atmosphere and reaches the surface of the Earth intact. And
this usually means a chunk of a rocky asteroid. It
seems that's what it is in most cases, but some
cases could possibly mean pieces of comets or even pieces
(17:46):
of other planets. Sometimes there'll be an impact and a
piece of Mars or something else breaks off and will
end up falling to Earth somehow. Now, most meteorites found
on Earth are not primarily of iron. There are three
main types of meteorites. You've got stony meteorites, which are
(18:07):
made mostly of silicon based rock. There are iron meteorites,
which are primarily made of solid metal, mostly iron, with
some nickel and other trace metals. And then there's a
hybrid category which are often considered quite beautiful. Maybe the
most visually striking of all of them, the stony iron meteorites,
which are a pretty close to even mix of iron
(18:29):
metal and silicate rock. Now, iron meteorites are not the
most common types of meteorites to fall to Earth. I've
read estimates that they're only about like five or six
percent of meteorite falls. But they are sometimes easier to
find than stony meteorites, and this might be in part
due to their durability and the environment and the really
(18:49):
stick around, but also probably in part because they look
weirder and more alien. And stony meteorites can look a
lot of different ways, but rob I just attached a
few examples for you to look at. A lot of
stony meteorites you could easily mistake for an earth based rock,
but iron meteorites more often, I guess you could still
mistake them for an earth based rock, but more of
(19:11):
them look like really strange.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Yeah, they have a very novel appearance that even the
novice would would likely look at and think, well, that's interesting.
I should pick that up and maybe take this back
and show it to someone who knows what's up with rocks,
because yeah, they have this fascinating kind of you know,
like cool liquid kind of appearance with all these dimples
(19:35):
and creases and so forth.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
Why is this a metal brain the size of a
bear in the middle of the desert?
Speaker 4 (19:42):
What is that?
Speaker 3 (19:44):
Iron meteorites are thought to probably be the remaining cores
of asteroids that at some point asteroids or parts of
former planetesimals that at some point melted and then re solidified.
They're mostly made of iron, Like I said, they have
some nickel content, as well as other traces of minerals
and metals, some cobalt content, some phosphorus, some sulfur, and
(20:08):
so forth. They are often found on Earth covered in
a black or rusty crust of iron oxide that forms
as they travel through the atmosphere. And there are two
primary minerals found in iron meteorites. You've got camosite, which
has relatively less nickel, and taanite, which has relatively more
(20:29):
Within iron meteorites. These two minerals camosite and taanite are
quite often found in an interesting interlocking crystal structure, which
when you cut a cross section of one of these
meteorites and you treat it with a weak or diluted acid,
it reveals this repeating arrangement of lines known as a
(20:50):
Vidmnstottin pattern. And to try to describe this, it looks
kind of like a texture of infinite triangles within triangles,
or you might say, like a actal representation of a
capital letter A in the English alphabet.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
Yeah, it looks very very sci fi, very futuristic, kind
of like some sort of you know, a chrome etching
of the interior scaffolding of the death Star or something.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
To come back to our stuff on, anomalous imagery is
one of those things that there are all kinds of
patterns like this in nature that make people say that's technology,
but no, that's just what these crystals do. And in fact,
the way this specifically looks seems to be a result
of creating a two dimensional cross sectional representation of an
(21:37):
underlying three dimensional structure that's known as an octahedral. So
an octahedron is a polyhedron, a three dimensional structure with
eight faces. So you can picture like two four sided
pyramids joined at the square base. Or if you're a
D and D player, you just picture a D eight die.
Speaker 1 (21:58):
Yeah, yeah, that's sematar damage.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
So the octahedral structure is created by the interaction of
these two different minerals chemousite and taanite. They formed these
different bands and boundaries, and then when they come together
like that and you cut through the middle of a
meteorite and you look at the pattern it makes. It's
this Vidmuin Stottin pattern. Now, we might come back and
(22:26):
talk more about iron meteorites themselves in the next episode.
But an interesting question is, so it was proposed long
ago that King Tut's dagger, as well as many of
these other iron artifacts, were made out of meteorite iron.
But is the dagger really meteorite iron? And if so,
how could we know? Well, there have been multiple investigations
(22:47):
of this over the years, and they've come up with
For a while, they came up with conflicting results. There
was some controversy over this, were different results, different investigators
came to different conclusions. But it seems to be that
the more recent research points very strongly to a meteoric origin.
So I'll mention a couple of studies. One is by
(23:07):
Daniellocomelli at All that was published in the journal Metiorritics
and Planetary Science in the year twenty sixteen, and it's
called the metiorritic origin of Toutencommon's Iron Dagger Blade. Now,
one thing that is an obstacle when you're investigating this
sort of thing is method because modern science has lots
(23:28):
of very powerful tools of chemical analysis, but many of
them are destructive techniques, so you would have to destroy
some small part of the artifact in order to analyze it.
And for obvious historical preservation reasons, researchers wanted to avoid
having to destroy part of a priceless historical dagger in
(23:48):
order to figure out what it's made of. So this investigation,
which by the way, the team was made up of
both Italian and Egyptian researchers, they use non destructive methods
analyze the blade with a non destructive imaging technique called
X ray fluorescence spectrometry to determine the composition of the blade.
(24:10):
So the way that works is you bombard the blade
with some radiation they use like a portable X ray scanner.
You bombard it with some radiation and then that radiation
causes the atoms in the blade to fluoresce, to like
give off light energy as they're you know, as the
radiation hits the electrons that are orbiting the atoms and
(24:30):
then causes some of them to fall down to lower
energy levels, and that puts off radiation in return. And
by analyzing what gets reflected back, you can see what
types of elements that it's made of. And what they
found was that the composition of the blade was iron
with a high percentage of nickel and cobalt. So I
think they found that it was mostly iron, with ten
(24:54):
point eight percent by weight nickel and zero point five
to eight percent by weight cobalt, and these numbers are
not to be found in earth based iron generally. Studies
have found that earth based iron extracted from before like
the eighteen hundreds tends to always have less than four
percent nickel by waight.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Yeah, yeah, I was reading some sources about this as well,
and yeah, a lot of it seems to come back
to the nickel.
Speaker 3 (25:19):
Though I've read some criticisms that you shouldn't go by
the nickel alone, and that to really be sure you
should look at like some other comparison points as well,
like the ratio of nickel to cobalt. I think some
other things as well.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
Yeah, there was one paper I was looking at Albert
Jambond from twenty seventeen Bronze Age iron meteoritic or not,
And this is the additional subheading subtitle a chemical strategy.
And in this one they pointed out like weathering is
also sometimes something that has to be taken into place
given the nickel levels that can be detected, and it
(25:57):
may have to do with like basically a weathering away
of some of the nickel content at least on the
testable portions of an artifact.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
But from what I could tell, most researchers are pretty
well convinced by this and other recent studies. There's another
one I'm gonna mention in a second saying that this
probably really is meteorite. So speaking to the BBC, the
lead author, Daniellacomelli, who by the way, is that she's
an experimental physicist affiliated with the Polytechnic University of Milan,
(26:27):
she sounds pretty confident. She says meteoric iron is clearly
indicated by the presence of this high percentage of nickel,
and in fact, the authors of this study from twenty
sixteen even matched the composition of the blade of Tutencommon's
dagger to that of a known meteorite in the region,
one which landed about two hundred and forty kilometers west
(26:49):
of the city of Alexandria. They also argue that the
blade shows what they call a high manufacturing quality, which
is not found in some of the other simple article
facts made out of meteorite iron from this period in Egypt.
So it shows that someone at this time had the
ability to work with iron at a high level. But
(27:10):
this type type of craftsmanship must have been rare.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
Yeah, yeah, rare craftsmanship befitting of a rare material. There's
there's one little bit I want to side here. This
is from the Brian and Fagan book The Seventy Great
Inventions of the Ancient World. Paul Ti Krattic is the
main writer on a chapter in that that deals with
with iron and other metals, and Kradick mentions the dagger
(27:38):
of tutan Common and there's an excellent photo of it
in that book. But then he adds an additional detail
from the following century. So this is a different culture
because as we've already mentioned, there there are other examples
of meteoric iron being used in you know, in very regal,
(27:59):
very ornamental pieces like this and this one, this particular
one is referred to in a letter. This is from
twelve fifty BCE. We have a letter from the Hittite
ruler Tatusilius the third to the king of Assyria, and
in this letter he apologizes for not being able to
(28:19):
supply iron and instead hopes that the gift of a
single accompanying iron blade will be acceptable Socratic rights quote.
So in twelve fifty BC, a single iron blade from
the one available source of iron was an appropriate placiatory
gift to another monarch. So, I mean you can also
(28:42):
see that in the fact that, yeah, King tut is
buried with one of these blades, you know, within his wrappings.
But you know, here's this other case where it's like
it just it just more evidence that like these things
were so highly valued.
Speaker 4 (28:54):
These are the.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
Kind of things that kings gave to each other, you know,
these are the kind of things that kings were buried with.
But Kradack also points out that mere centuries later iron
making industry would end up stretching across Eurasia. So again,
iron ore is very common, but it is the last
metal of antiquity to be smelted, due in part to
(29:16):
the high melting point.
Speaker 3 (29:18):
Yeah, I'm almost trying to imagine. I mean, I get
the change took place. I suppose over a long enough
period of time that you wouldn't have really had stuff
like this, I guess, But I'm imagining somebody clutching extremely valuable,
you know, precious iron artifacts of a ceremonial value, and
then suddenly, like the you know, the iron working and
(29:38):
the iron smelting comes into vogue, and now iron is
all over the place, and it's just it's not the
same anymore.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
Yeah, but they would still have the appeal of having
this source that is associated with the sky as having
come from heaven or from the cosmos and the gods
and so forth. And that is something that I've I've
seen reference in some other sources that I'll probably come
back to later on that, certainly in the Chinese examples,
(30:07):
you know, the Chinese, the ancient Chinese were aware of meteorites,
that they knew about these various events, and they wrote
about them in their early literature, and therefore there was
likely this connection in place. So it was this precious
metal that was unlike the metal used for other tools
and so forth, unlike even other precious metals and other
(30:32):
stones and so forth that were used. But then there
was also the story behind it, the idea that it
has some sort of connection to the cosmos.
Speaker 3 (30:40):
I want to get to something about that story within
an Egyptian context in just a minute. But first I
promised I was going to mention another study on the
meteor origin of the iron in the blade. So the
other study I wanted to point out was from twenty
twenty two. This is in the journal I think the
same journal, Yeah, same journal Media and Planetary Science, And
(31:02):
this is by Takafumi Matsui at All, and it's called
the Manufacture and Origin of the Tuton Common Metiorritic Iron Dagger.
And this paper further supports the conclusion that the iron
in the King's Dagger is from a meteorite, and not
only that adds evidence about what kind of meteorite and
so the author's right quote. Here we report non destructive
(31:26):
two dimensional chemical analysis of the Tuton Common iron dagger
conducted at the Egyptian Museum of Cairo. Elemental mapping of
nickel on the dagger blade surface shows discontinuous banded arrangements
in places with cubic symmetry and a bandwidth of about
one millimeters, suggesting a Vidmin stotton pattern. Remember that, Yeah, ah, yeah,
(31:49):
So the intermediate nickel content with the presence of the
Vidmin stotton pattern implies the source meteorite of the dagger
blade to be octahedrite. So again that's the octahedron the
d eight die. Furthermore, they say that the quote randomly
distributed sulfur rich black spots are likely remnants of troylite
(32:11):
inclusions in iron meteorite. So remember those black spots I
mentioned on the dagger that I said looked like lunar maria,
You know, those strange kind of geographical looking depressions and
dark spots. These authors conclude that those are probably sulfur
rich troylite inclusions, little impurities in the original metal made
(32:34):
of mineral iron sulfide and so iron sulfide.
Speaker 4 (32:38):
By the way, you.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
Ever boil a hard boiled egg too long and it
ends up with a green cake forming around the yolk.
That's iron sulfide. I think hydrogen sulfide in the egg
white reacts with iron and the egg yolk and makes
iron sulfide. So yeah, that's what that gross green stuff is.
Speaker 4 (32:58):
It's not gonna hurt you. You can still eat it.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
You are not a fan of green eggs.
Speaker 3 (33:02):
Well, no, I'm fine with a full green eggs. I
don't love the green case around the yolk. I feel
like you boiled that too long.
Speaker 4 (33:10):
That's a no, no, okay.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
I won't do any of the follow up questions about
whether you would need it with a goat and so forth.
Speaker 4 (33:18):
I need anything with a goat.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
You know.
Speaker 3 (33:20):
Goat's just good company that makes even unpalatable food.
Speaker 4 (33:23):
Fine, Yes, they are quite amusing anyway.
Speaker 3 (33:26):
The authors of the paper argue that the Vidmans dot
and pattern and the Troy light inclusions, the fact that
those were preserved, these things together indicate that the iron
was probably forged and worked at low temperatures of less
than nine hundred and fifty degrees celsius. They also even
use material analysis to not just say, like what physically
(33:48):
the stagger is, but to connect it to some historical documents.
I don't think they were the first people to make
this connection, but they used some material analysis to kind
of back it up. So the authors here argued that
this dagger was quite possibly a gift given to Tutenkommon's
likely grandfather, Amenhotep the third, from the kingdom of Mitani
(34:13):
in Anatolia, because there is a tablet mentioning such a
gift among Egyptian records. There's a tablet that says, you know,
they're they're sending a gift to Amenhotep the third and
it's described as an iron dagger with a golden hilt.
And then the bit of material evidence that backs this
up is that there is lime plaster used to glue
(34:36):
jim stones to the gold hilt, and that lime plaster
glue is characteristic of Mitani craftsmanship rather than Egyptian, which
tended to use gypsum plaster instead. So this dagger, wrapped
up with the body of King Tut inside his wrappings
laying on his thigh, seems to have been made out
of metal that came from a meteorite, and it's a
(34:59):
good guessed that this was a gift to King Tut's
grandfather from Anatolia.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
Wow, now some of you are probably wondering, well, which
god was in charge of all of this, So a
brief sidebar here on this in general. For this I
turned once more to Geraldine Pinch's book and Egyptian Mythology,
and essentially we should probably point out, yeah, that the
Egyptian god associated with metal working is the god Taw.
(35:27):
And not only is Ta associated with metalworking, he's also
held up as a kind of creator deity. And some
of these traditions said to have designed and crafted the world,
to have smelt the new lands, and I found this interesting.
Made bodies for the kings of Egypt out of electrum, copper,
and iron bodies according to Pinch, that were presumably made
(35:52):
so that they could occupy those bodies in the lands
beyond death, So this would be like your resurrected metal
body for the next one world. He Ta here, though
is often described as being beautiful of face. His skin
is often described as being blue, though I've also seen
it green in some depictions. He wears an artisan's cap,
(36:13):
and he is associated with dwarves, perhaps to the to
the fact that dwarves were often employed in gym working,
and this on its own is a pretty fascinating topic.
The role of dwarves in ancient Egypt. There are a
few different papers on this. Some of these individuals worked
in entertainment or as personal attendants. Others were animal tenders
(36:35):
and indeed jewelers. But also there were individuals of the
Old Kingdom who rose to high rank and status and
were buried as such. And we're able, you know, to
tell they had that status because of the way they
were buried. So it's it's often argued that cultural acceptance
was pretty high for them. And and Ta was ultimately
just one of multiple gods held to have a dwarf
(36:55):
in form of one sort or another. And Ta also
would later be equated with Hephaestus by the Greeks, though
of course Hephaestus was not beautiful of face, I think
in most traditions.
Speaker 3 (37:17):
So meteorites have of course been found by people since prehistory,
but how often did we actually understand what they were
and where they came from. Just one example of people
not generally accepting that meteorites came from outer space is
European scientists up until the early nineteenth century. There's a
(37:37):
good summary of this history of like the debate about
the origin of meteorites in the book Cosmic Horizons, edited
by Steven Soda and Neil deGrasse Tyson. I think it
was published in the year two thousand and The short
version of the story is that there have long been
reports from people, you know, seeing fireballs in the sky
(37:59):
or hearing explode, then finding rocks that they believed had
fallen from above. But as of the late eighteenth century,
most scientists of the European Enlightenment doubted that stones actually
fell from the sky, or if they did believe it,
they thought maybe that the stones, you know, came from
somewhere on Earth. They couldn't have come from outer space.
(38:19):
Maybe they were thrown from a distant volcano, or maybe
they were picked up and tossed by a hurricane far away.
Because at the time there was a sort of a dogma.
There was a convention that space, apart from the planets
and the comets, was empty. You know, you got the Earth,
you got the Sun, the planets, the stars, the comets,
(38:41):
but other than that, it's just empty out there. There's
not like stuff flying around. However, a German physicist by
the name of Ernst Kladney, who lived seventeen fifty six
to eighteen twenty seven published a book in the year
seventeen ninety four arguing that these reports were accurate and
that rocks and pieces of iron actually do sometimes fall
(39:02):
from the sky, in some cases creating fireballs and explosions
as they are heated by friction traveling through the atmosphere.
Cladney was an interesting guy. He was a lawyer by training,
but he was also very into music and acoustics, and
he discovered a way of visualizing sound waves by putting
(39:24):
dust or powder on a plate and then vibrating the
plate by rubbing it with a violin bow, and so
the powder would range itself into these patterns that were
related to the sound waves produced. Cladney went about collecting
eyewitness reports of fireballs and meteorite falls from the sky,
and he tried to evaluate them for credibility and see
(39:46):
what could be learned from them, and eventually he concluded
that yes, rocks really do fall from space. One thing
he did was use descriptions of fireballs to estimate the
speed at which these rocks were entering the Earth's atmosphere,
and he realized they must be going much faster than
could be accounted for by the Earth's gravity alone, so
(40:09):
they're not simply falling, but they must be flying through
space at extreme velocities. And this connected with the fact
that when these alleged rocks were found, they looked scorched
all over. The friction of entering the atmosphere at these
high speeds melted their outer shells, and so he looked
into it. He published this book in seventeen ninety four,
and it was initially met with skepticism by his peers
(40:31):
by European scientists, but many scientists updated their beliefs due
to new emerging evidence. They sort of got lucky with
some things, some documented events that really backed up his argument,
including a widely reported meteor fall near Siena, Italy, just
a couple of months after the book was published, another
(40:52):
one in England which included an eyewitness account of a
farmer who claimed a black rock hit the earth only
thirty feet away from him and caused an explosion in
the mud that splattered all over his body. And then
there was another one in Normandy in eighteen oh three,
which was extensively documented by the French physicist to Jean
(41:12):
Baptiste bo which included reports of a fireball as well
as an elliptical impact area that had many weird stones
within it. And so these reports were supplemented by chemical
and mineral analysis of some of these meteorite samples, and
it turned out that these samples were unlike any rocks
or metal ores known of on Earth. For example, the
(41:35):
rocks contained what they called at the time globules. These
are now known as chondrules, their little round grains within
the structure of the rock that began as molten droplets
of minerals in space, and then a crete together within asteroids.
Also connecting to what we've already found, they discovered that
(41:55):
iron meteorrite fragments contained levels of nickel that had never
been obsor in Earth based iron. And then, finally another
piece of evidence was the discovery of the first asteroid,
the Dwarf Planet series in eighteen oh one, which suggested
that space between the planets and the comets was not empty.
There were lots of rocky things floating around out there,
(42:18):
and some of them might occasionally land on Earth, and
that was in fact what meteorites were. So it was
more than one hundred years after Newton's principia that the
true origin of meteorites was widely accepted among European scientists.
But that brings me to an article that I wanted
to talk about to address the question of what the
(42:39):
ancient Egyptians knew. So I was reading an article in
the anthropology magazine Sapiens written by an Egyptologist who named
Victoria Almansa Vilatro. This is from twenty twenty three, and
if Almansa Villatoro's argument is correct, the fact that meteorites
come from space or from the sky was known to
the ancient Egyptians. Just one cool example she mentions in
(43:02):
the article is there's an interesting inscription in hieroglyphics inside
the pyramid of Unus at Sakara. Unus was the last
pharaoh of the Fifth Dynasty during Egypt's Old Kingdom, and
he ruled in the middle of the twenty fourth century BCE,
so like forty four hundred years ago, and the sentence
(43:23):
from the pyramid text reads, Eunus the king seizes the
sky and splits its iron. Now, this article in Sapiens
is based somewhat on Almansa Villatorro's academic publication in the
Journal of Egyptian Archaeology from twenty nineteen called the cultural
Indexicality of the n forty one sign for beat this. Oh,
(43:46):
this's got some strange characters. BJ three sort of is
what it looks like the metal of the sky and
the sky of metal. Now this includes a lot of
linguistic arguments that are way over my head, but I
was just going through to get the main point and
pull out some details. And one of the things I
wanted to get to I wanted to mention briefly just
because I thought it was interesting before getting to remain
(44:08):
conclusions or about the religious and ceremonial functions of iron.
All Monts of Villaturo mentions in the paper that pre
Iron Age iron artifacts are associated in Egypt with an
elaborate funerary ritual known as the opening of the Mouth,
which was a sort of ceremony performed over a dead body.
(44:28):
I think often of a king or a ruler, but
a ceremony over a body that seems to be sort
of activated the powers of life beyond death. It's sort
of like turning on afterlife mode to give you the
powers of like eating and drinking and speaking in the afterlife.
And I briefly got very interested in this. So this
was not in the paper, but I went looking for
(44:49):
a text of the spoken part of the opening of
the mouth ceremony. I think there are a lot of
different versions of this, but the one I found in
particular was a translation of the ritual from the two
Zoum Chapel of rech Mirah, which involved like dedicating a
statue of the dead, and the text includes the following lines, Uh,
(45:09):
there's a letter, a capital letter in here which just
refers to the name of the dead. So when you
hear in, you think of the name of the dead.
It goes, I have balanced your mouth and bones for you.
In I have opened your mouth for you. In I
open your mouth for you with the new uplade. I
have opened your mouth for you with the new uplade.
(45:30):
The mesca hetch you blade of iron that opens the
mouths of gods. Horace is the opener of the mouth
of N.
Speaker 4 (45:37):
Horace.
Speaker 3 (45:38):
Horace has opened the mouth of N. Horace has opened
the mouth of N with that which he opened the
mouth of his father, with which he opened the mouth
of Osiris, with the iron that came from Seth. The
mesketch you blade of iron with which the mouths of
gods are opened. May you open the mouth of N with.
Speaker 1 (45:57):
It nice and we get that connection back to Osiris,
who we talked about previously on the show. This is
interesting too because then when I was researching ta who
I talked about earlier, the Egyptian god associated with the craftsmanship.
There was also mention in Pinch's work about the opening
of the mouth ceremony and elsewhere in the book she
(46:19):
talks about the Horus connection and so forth. But it
seems like Tad did have some sort of connection to
this as well, and she mentions that it was used
for mummies but also for sculptures, and maybe given his
craftsmanship angle, he's more aligned with that end of it.
I'm not entirely certain, but yeah, imbuing life into the sculpture,
(46:41):
embodying it somehow, and like you said, perhaps turning on
after life mode for the mummified body of an important person.
Speaker 3 (46:51):
But also very interesting that implements specifically of iron are
associated with this ritual, that it has some kind of
mythical or ritual potency here. So all months of Laturo
in this article gets into the fact that before the
widespread or large scale smelting of iron and iron working
within Egypt, there are still these these iron artifacts that
(47:13):
are thought to be made primarily of iron sourced from meteorites,
and that they almost always again serve this more ceremonial
or decorative function. They are either objects of kind of
wealth and power and decoration, they symbolize status maybe or
that they have this religious significance. But anyway, I wanted
(47:37):
to come back to the core question of like, what
is the evidence that the ancient Egyptians actually understood that
this meteoritic iron or meteorite iron came from the sky.
And so she writes in the second millennium BCE, the
Egyptian word or phrase used to refer to iron was
a phrase that literally can mean the metal of the
(47:59):
sky or the iron of the sky, and there are
early known Egyptian associations between iron and the sky. So
you've got the pyramid pyramid text which are texts inscribed
on the inner walls of the pyramids where the Egyptian
kings and queens of the fifth to eighth dynasties of
the Old Kingdom were buried. This would cover a period
(48:22):
of like forty one hundred to forty four hundred years
ago or so. These texts included incantations that would be
recited by priests to guide the dead rulers into the afterlife,
and the Pyramid texts describe a really interesting cosmology, really
interesting picture of how the universe was shaped. And in
(48:43):
her work, almnts of Llatro argues that the way they
described the sky should be pictured as a giant iron
bowl with water in it, and water can fall from
the bowl. I guess that's rain, but also chunks of
the iron bowl is self can fall to the earth,
and these would be iron meteorites. Now the author admits
(49:06):
that it's not obvious this is what's being described. You
have to sort of decode a linked system of metaphors
within the glyphs of the Egyptian language. She writes, quote,
in the Pyramid texts, the word for iron is written
with a hieroglyph that represents a hemispherical container of water.
How the Egyptians perceived the sky. Iron and sky are
(49:28):
interchangeable in the texts, which is why passages describe the
dead saling the iron and the king needing to break
an iron barrier to reach the sky. And then she
documents how there are also links between the concept of
iron and the concept of water, because remember, in many
ancient cosmologies, people sort of believe the sky was in
(49:49):
some sense full of water, and so maybe when it rains,
that's water leaking out of the waters above. And so
Almans of Vulatora writes that the goddess Newt personified the sky.
But also at this period there are religious texts explaining
the belief that in the afterlife a dead royal would
return to the waters of Newts Uterus, and so this
(50:14):
sign used for iron is also associated with the word
for uterus and the word for well, like water well.
And so she admits there might be legitimate reasons for
doubting this interpretation that these associations mean that the Egyptians
knew that iron meteorites came from the sky. And one
(50:34):
is the simple question of, like, how likely is it
in a given space and time period that someone would
be able to like have the like witness a meteorite falling,
which itself is a fairly rare event, witness it falling,
and then have it be lucky enough that it lands
very physically close that you can close enough that you
(50:56):
can go find the physical meteorite and then associate it
with the falling you saw from above, and put all
that information together and then also pass it on for
it to become general cultural knowledge. You know, that would
take a sort of like a lucky confluence of events
that themselves might be fairly rare, but you know, it
(51:19):
happens often enough that there are records of other times
in places where people did see something falling and then
they claim to have found a stone or something. So
it's certainly not impossible. And in the case of ancient Egypt,
it seems like there's this linguistic and literary evidence that
would help support that idea that people did have this
cultural knowledge making a link between iron and the sky
(51:42):
and the waters above.
Speaker 1 (51:44):
Yeah yeah, and then again perhaps throwing in the you know,
the idea of the desert being an ideal place to
spot them in the dark stone standing out against the
lighter colored sand, and so forth. May come back to
meteor hunting a little bit in subsequent episodes to explore
this this aspect of everything a bit more.
Speaker 4 (52:06):
Yeah yeah.
Speaker 3 (52:07):
One more thing she knows that I think is interesting
is this is not totally unique to the Egyptian language.
She also notes that there is a similar sort of
linguistic link in ancient Sumerian, which also characterizes iron as
sort of the metal of the sky.
Speaker 1 (52:23):
Excellent, excellent. Well, in the next episode, I think we're
going to get into some more examples. We're gonna we're
gonna keep exploring the overall topic, but we'll also get
into some other specific examples from other cultures. Well, we'll
sort of ask some of the same questions of Chinese traditions.
You know, did they know that this iron came from above?
(52:45):
And what did that mean to them? And so forth. So, yeah,
there are a lot of additional interesting angles to explore,
and there are some other other examples and alleged examples
of meteoric iron being used in artifacts that are related
to to cultures that I didn't even know how to
tradition of using such substances. So it'll be it'll be
(53:06):
fascinating to continue to.
Speaker 4 (53:07):
Explore this, no doubt. I'm excited.
Speaker 1 (53:10):
Yeah, So in the meantime, if you have thoughts on
this topic, if you if there are specific examples you
want to get in there early and say yes, make
sure you cover this, go ahead and hit us with it.
You know, we're we're in we're still in research mode here,
we're still writing up the notes. So you know there's
time to get it in there, and if not, it's
something we can discuss on our listener mail episodes. Our
(53:32):
listener mail episodes published Mondays in the Stuff to Blow
Your Mind podcast feed Our core episodes are on Tuesdays
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(53:54):
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(54:15):
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Speaker 3 (54:25):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
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You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (54:47):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb. We're out this week, so we have
some episodes from the vault here for you. This is
going to be part one of our series on meteoric
metal and alien iron. This one originally published five seven,
twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
And I'm Joe McCormick. And today on Stuff to Blow
Your Mind, we wanted to kick off a series of
episodes on tools, blades, weapons, artifacts, ceremonial ornaments, and various
things things made by humans out of materials that came
from outer space, particularly stuff made from mediorite iron.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Yeah. So, whether you've listened to our show before or not,
you're probably familiar with the three age system of classifying
ancient civilizations, defining them by their material and the technological
level of advancement for that given civilization. And this is
not without its complexity and even its controversy, as we'll
get into, but it divides things into the Stone Age,
(01:22):
the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age. In this series
of episodes, from stuff to blow your mind. We're going
to be dealing predominantly with the age of bronze, typified
by its bronze production and lasting very roughly, and these
dates are not solid for all places and civilizations. A
strong caveat there from somewhere around thirty three hundred to
(01:44):
twelve hundred BCE. So we're dealing with a very amorphous
period of time here, and the transference into the Age
of Iron is much the same. But before we jump
into the key example that we're going to be looking
at in this episode, I just wanted to share a
couple of quotes to perhaps help put this time frame
in perspective and even cast a different light on civilization
(02:07):
before the widespread production and use of iron. Both of
these are from books that deal more specifically with Chinese
technology and Chinese history, but I believe some of the
takeaways from both of these quotes are just appliable across
the board. So this first one is a quote from
John Key in his book A History of China. He writes, quote, Indeed,
(02:31):
bronze came to occupy much the same position in ancient
China as stone in the contemporary civilization of Egypt or
later those of Iran, Persia and Greece. Enormous effort was
devoted to producing bronzewere highly sophisticated ideas were expressed through it.
Some of the earliest inscriptions were found on it, and
its durability has ensured that plentiful examples have survived. And
(02:55):
this other quote is from Joseph Needham, whose work we've
discussed in the show before, from Science and Society in
Ancient China quote, it looks as if the earliest kings
or feudal princes recognized bronze metallurgy to be the basis
of feudal power over the Neolithic peasantry because of the
superior arms which it rendered possible, and therefore they appropriated
(03:17):
that the technique of metalworking. So what I like about
these two quotes is I think they helped drive home
that bronze was not only a material for tools, but
a material through which culture was made manifest, as well
as a source of power, both in physical weaponry and
even just as an idea. And while these examples, again
are both from texts that focus exclusively on Chinese history,
(03:38):
I think you can sort of get a broader take
home from them, Like I said earlier, So on top
of that, I would say, also, I think it's essential
to keep in mind that the Bronze age was far
from just a period between or a precursor to something
better or more advanced. It was a time of great
technological and cultural advancement. It was the age of the
wheel of irrigation, writing systems, enhanced weaponry, and much more.
(04:03):
And it's not merely the time before iron. It is
the time that gave birth to iron technology as well well.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
And I think that can really be driven home in
the fact that iron is not even necessarily for all
uses a superior metal to bronze. Bronze could be considered
materially superior in some ways. It's just that iron, once
you have the technology to smelt it and then work
it in the high temperatures you need, it is easier
(04:32):
to produce at mass scales and cheaper.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Yeah, I mean, there's definitely from what I've read, there's
definitely a period of time in which your early smelted
iron tools, weapons, what have you are not going to
be as durable and as highly efficient as the high
end bronze weapons and tools of that same time period.
Speaker 4 (04:53):
But you can make more of them.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
Right, right, But eventually, of course iron comes to.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
Dominate, especially in the form of steel.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Yes, I know some will say steel isn't strong, flesh
is strong, YadA, YadA, YadA, but steel's pretty strong. Well.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
I do want to start within one of the regional
Bronze ages to start off today's episode by looking at
a very intriguing and mysterious artifact from ancient Egypt. This
is a dagger from the stars found buried alongside the
pharaoh tutin Common. So the tomb of the eighteenth dynasty
(05:28):
Egyptian pharaoh tutin Common was uncovered by the British archaeologist
Howard Carter and his team in nineteen twenty two. Tuton
Common reigned from thirteen sixty one to thirteen fifty two BCE,
becoming king around the age of nine or so, unruling
until his early death around the age of eighteen. Tutin
(05:50):
Common is thought to have been a son of the
pharaoh Akinaten, though from what I understand this relationship is
not totally certain. There is a DNA relation to another
mummy that has been found that is presumed to be Acinatin,
but it's not known for sure. Acintin, his likely father,
was notable for trying to replace the traditional polytheistic religion
(06:12):
of Egypt with a it's debatable how to characterize this,
but a monotheistic or monolteristic or perhaps henotheistic, whatever you
call it, focus on a single god, an emphasis of
one God above all the others from the Egyptian pantheon,
and that is the solar deity Aughtan, which took the
form of the disk of the Sun. We've talked about
(06:34):
that sort of attempt to go one God early in
Egypt before, but this shift did not last long after
Acinatin's death, and one of Tutonkommon's main accomplishments as pharaoh
seems to have been the restoration of the old polytheistic cults.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Yeah, the rejection of new coke and the reacceptance of
old coke.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
Play in the hits getting the old gang together. So
Tummons Tomb was considered a very special discovery in the
twentieth century because even though it had been partially looted
at least twice shortly after it was sealed, it was
still considered relatively intact compared to other tombs. So many
of the original grave goods were still in place, and
(07:18):
this was not really the case at all for most
of the other royal tombs of ancient Egypt. They were
mostly scoured by grave robbers thousands of years ago. This
is sometimes misstated as saying that that tuten Coommon's Tune
tomb had never been disturbed, and that's not true. It
was robbed long ago like all the rest of them,
it just didn't get robbed as much. And some have
(07:39):
speculated that Tuten Common's tomb was relatively well preserved because
the entrance got covered up by stuff and people pretty
quickly forgot where it was. And so when this tomb
was rediscovered in the twentieth century, it contained a wealth
of treasures and a beautiful, wonderful glimpse into the past.
So for a taste of the variety of objects found
(08:01):
in the tomb, I just wanted to read directly from
the diary entry of Howard Carter describing the day of
November twenty sixth, nineteen twenty two, when his team finally
cleared away the last of the rubble from the passageway
into the tomb and got the first look inside. So
Carter writes, quote, it was some time before one could see.
The hot air escaping caused the candle to flicker, But
(08:24):
as soon as one's eyes became accustomed to the glimmer
of light, the interior of the chamber gradually loomed before one,
with its strange and wonderful medley of extraordinary and beautiful
objects heaped upon one another. There was naturally short suspense
for those present who could not see. When Lord Carnivon
said to me, can you see anything? I replied to him, yes,
(08:46):
it is wonderful. I then, with precaution, made the whole
sufficiently large for both of us to see. With the
light of an electric torch as well as an additional candle,
we looked in. Our sensations and astonishment are difficult to describe,
as the better light revealed to us the marvelous collection
of treasures. Two strange ebony black effigies of a king,
(09:07):
gold sandaled bearing staff and mace loomed out from the
cloak of darkness. Gilded couches in strange forms lion headed,
hathor headed, and beast infernal, exquisitely painted inlaid and ornamental caskets, flowers,
alabaster vases, some beautifully executed of lotus and papyrus device,
(09:29):
strange black shrines with a gilded monster snake appearing from within,
quite ordinary looking white chests, finely carved chairs, a golden
inlaid throne, a heap of large, curious white oviform boxes
beneath our very eyes on the threshold, a lovely lodiform
wishing cup in translucent alabaster, stools of all shapes and
(09:51):
design of both common and rare materials. And lastly, a
confusion of overturned parts of chariots glinting with gold, peering
from amongst which was a mannequin, the first impression of
which suggested the property room of an opera of a
vanished civilization. Our sensations were bewildering and full of strange emotion.
(10:13):
We questioned one another as to the meaning of it all.
Was it a tomb or merely a cash A sealed
doorway between the two sentinel statues proved there was more beyond,
and with the numerous cartouches bearing the name of Touton
common on most of the objects before us, there was
little doubt that there behind was the grave of that pharaoh.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
Yeah, yeah, I like the atmosphere. He captures here in
this description.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
One of my favorite things is the description of the
disassembled parts of the chariot all there piled.
Speaker 4 (10:45):
Up in the tomb.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
Anyway, documenting the contents of the tomb went on for
years after the initial discovery, and one of the objects
found later, this was in nineteen twenty five. This was
buried right alone along with the pharaoh's body. One of
these artifacts, it was a beautiful dagger. In fact, there
were two daggers buried with toot and common, one made
(11:09):
of gold and another made of iron. And ironically it's
the iron dagger that I would like to focus on,
so Rob, I've got some pictures for you to look
at here, sort of like with different sides of the
dagger facing and then different types of illumination. But the
iron dagger is a little over a foot long, and
(11:30):
it was found not only within the king's tomb, but
with his mummified remains inside the inner coffin, and in fact,
not only in the inner coffin, but literally inside the
king's wrappings, so wrapped up with him up against his thigh,
the gold dagger was apparently on his abdomen.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
Yeah, it's a very splendid looking weapon, and there are
no shortage of images of this, you can easily look
up online.
Speaker 3 (11:55):
So the knife has a handle made out of gold
with a crystal knob on the end, sort of very
smooth and rounded off crystal knob, and a golden sheath
decorated with images of on one part a repeating feather pattern.
There are flowers I think maybe supposed to be lilli's,
and there's also a jackal's head. And surprisingly, this dagger
(12:18):
made out of iron remained relatively rust free for all
these centuries. Though it does have blemishes, they're not rust Instead,
it has black spots in the middle that to me
almost look like lunar maria.
Speaker 4 (12:30):
They're these sort.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
Of you know, strange, beautiful little black depressions that have
almost geographical looking edges.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (12:39):
Yeah, So this.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
Dagger made of iron was instantly quite interesting to experts
because it was made of iron. Toot In Common lived
at a time when iron artifacts were quite rare in Egypt,
not completely non existent, but precious and few. We associate
iron today with raw utility. I think of like just
(13:01):
stacks of rebar and stuff, you know, Like we think
of its hardness and toughness and its ready availability. So,
of course iron and steel, steel being a product of iron,
are thought of as useful for making durable workaday tools
machine parts, in architecture, for making bridges and framing buildings
and so forth. But in Tutan Commons Egypt, the evidence
(13:25):
indicates that the rare iron artifacts that did exist were
treated instead as sacred, decorative and ceremonial items, more like
we treat gold and silver today, except perhaps even more precious. Now,
why would something as cheap, abundant and mundane as iron
(13:45):
be treated as precious sacred material. It seems to be
because at the time iron was anything but abundant and mundane.
The mundane iron that we think of today is extracted
from iron ore that we mine out of the ground,
and then we extract in pure metallic form from its
ore form in extremely hot furnaces. And while there were
(14:09):
plenty of iron ore deposits in the deserts of Egypt,
there was not a widespread industry that was able to
separate pure metallic iron from its ore in the region
until several hundred years later. Now, why was iron harder
to work with and extract than other metals such as
the copper tin alloy that forms the basis of ancient bronze.
(14:32):
I think that there's sort of a more complicated answer
and a sort of a simpler answer, And the simpler
answer is basically higher melting point, Like it takes more
energy to extract iron from its ore, and it takes
more heat to make it malleable and workable once it
is extracted.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Yeah, yeah, I remember we went into some of this
back when we did an episode on the One Ring
of the Lord of the Rings, and you know, talking
about what kind of metals would would melt or not
melt the constraints that are laid out in the text.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
However, there was one source of pure or to some
degree pure metallic iron available before the smelting process was developed,
and that source of metallic iron was meteorites, chunks of
iron that fell from space. So experts have for a
(15:23):
long time suggested that maybe King Tut's dagger, and not
just his dagger, but other iron artifacts that were also
found within the tomb and other iron artifacts from ancient
Egypt from this period and before, were in fact meteoric
in origin, that they were hammered out of iron that
fell to Earth from the sky.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
So your exploitive headline here, of course, is ancient Egyptian
to use space weapons, and I've seen various indulgences of
that sort of thing. But I mean, yeah, you're not
too far off the mark with that, even if you
are implying things that are not true as well. I've
even seen alien weapons mentioned before.
Speaker 3 (16:04):
Now before those of you get too excited, no this,
this is not ancient alien stuff.
Speaker 4 (16:09):
No, this would be.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
This does not need to be a gift from aliens
that came from above, because meteorites still land on Earth today.
They land naturally. People can find them.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Right right, And that of course is especially true if
you if in one or two situations with meteorites, is
it dramatic in its entry or do you have an
environment in which objects like this are easy to find,
such as a desert. So you will find various desert
environments where there is a long tradition of gathering such
(16:41):
meteorites because they stand out more. But you know, even
if you see or think you see something fall, you
can also get into trouble trying to to find what
fell from the sky. We've talked about the the phenomena
of star jelly before. This is where someone sees a
shooting star or things of meteorite fallen in their general
(17:01):
vicinity and they go out into the woods and they
start poking around. Do they find something that they think
looks weird? And it may be like just some sort
of slimy substance in the forest. It's a slimy substance
that was always there or is frequently there, but they
just never went out and poked it and looked for
it before. So ultimately you have to know what you're doing.
But a desert environment can be a real gift to
(17:22):
the meteorite.
Speaker 4 (17:23):
Hunter, that's right.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
So what is a meteorite, Well, a meteorite is, in short,
any solid natural object that falls from space through our
atmosphere and reaches the surface of the Earth intact. And
this usually means a chunk of a rocky asteroid. It
seems that's what it is in most cases, but some
cases could possibly mean pieces of comets or even pieces
(17:46):
of other planets. Sometimes there'll be an impact and a
piece of Mars or something else breaks off and will
end up falling to Earth somehow. Now, most meteorites found
on Earth are not primarily of iron. There are three
main types of meteorites. You've got stony meteorites, which are
(18:07):
made mostly of silicon based rock. There are iron meteorites,
which are primarily made of solid metal, mostly iron, with
some nickel and other trace metals. And then there's a
hybrid category which are often considered quite beautiful. Maybe the
most visually striking of all of them, the stony iron meteorites,
which are a pretty close to even mix of iron
(18:29):
metal and silicate rock. Now, iron meteorites are not the
most common types of meteorites to fall to Earth. I've
read estimates that they're only about like five or six
percent of meteorite falls. But they are sometimes easier to
find than stony meteorites, and this might be in part
due to their durability and the environment and the really
(18:49):
stick around, but also probably in part because they look
weirder and more alien. And stony meteorites can look a
lot of different ways, but rob I just attached a
few examples for you to look at. A lot of
stony meteorites you could easily mistake for an earth based rock,
but iron meteorites more often, I guess you could still
mistake them for an earth based rock, but more of
(19:11):
them look like really strange.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Yeah, they have a very novel appearance that even the
novice would would likely look at and think, well, that's interesting.
I should pick that up and maybe take this back
and show it to someone who knows what's up with rocks,
because yeah, they have this fascinating kind of you know,
like cool liquid kind of appearance with all these dimples
(19:35):
and creases and so forth.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
Why is this a metal brain the size of a
bear in the middle of the desert?
Speaker 4 (19:42):
What is that?
Speaker 3 (19:44):
Iron meteorites are thought to probably be the remaining cores
of asteroids that at some point asteroids or parts of
former planetesimals that at some point melted and then re solidified.
They're mostly made of iron, Like I said, they have
some nickel content, as well as other traces of minerals
and metals, some cobalt content, some phosphorus, some sulfur, and
(20:08):
so forth. They are often found on Earth covered in
a black or rusty crust of iron oxide that forms
as they travel through the atmosphere. And there are two
primary minerals found in iron meteorites. You've got camosite, which
has relatively less nickel, and taanite, which has relatively more
(20:29):
Within iron meteorites. These two minerals camosite and taanite are
quite often found in an interesting interlocking crystal structure, which
when you cut a cross section of one of these
meteorites and you treat it with a weak or diluted acid,
it reveals this repeating arrangement of lines known as a
(20:50):
Vidmnstottin pattern. And to try to describe this, it looks
kind of like a texture of infinite triangles within triangles,
or you might say, like a actal representation of a
capital letter A in the English alphabet.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
Yeah, it looks very very sci fi, very futuristic, kind
of like some sort of you know, a chrome etching
of the interior scaffolding of the death Star or something.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
To come back to our stuff on, anomalous imagery is
one of those things that there are all kinds of
patterns like this in nature that make people say that's technology,
but no, that's just what these crystals do. And in fact,
the way this specifically looks seems to be a result
of creating a two dimensional cross sectional representation of an
(21:37):
underlying three dimensional structure that's known as an octahedral. So
an octahedron is a polyhedron, a three dimensional structure with
eight faces. So you can picture like two four sided
pyramids joined at the square base. Or if you're a
D and D player, you just picture a D eight die.
Speaker 1 (21:58):
Yeah, yeah, that's sematar damage.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
So the octahedral structure is created by the interaction of
these two different minerals chemousite and taanite. They formed these
different bands and boundaries, and then when they come together
like that and you cut through the middle of a
meteorite and you look at the pattern it makes. It's
this Vidmuin Stottin pattern. Now, we might come back and
(22:26):
talk more about iron meteorites themselves in the next episode.
But an interesting question is, so it was proposed long
ago that King Tut's dagger, as well as many of
these other iron artifacts, were made out of meteorite iron.
But is the dagger really meteorite iron? And if so,
how could we know? Well, there have been multiple investigations
(22:47):
of this over the years, and they've come up with
For a while, they came up with conflicting results. There
was some controversy over this, were different results, different investigators
came to different conclusions. But it seems to be that
the more recent research points very strongly to a meteoric origin.
So I'll mention a couple of studies. One is by
(23:07):
Daniellocomelli at All that was published in the journal Metiorritics
and Planetary Science in the year twenty sixteen, and it's
called the metiorritic origin of Toutencommon's Iron Dagger Blade. Now,
one thing that is an obstacle when you're investigating this
sort of thing is method because modern science has lots
(23:28):
of very powerful tools of chemical analysis, but many of
them are destructive techniques, so you would have to destroy
some small part of the artifact in order to analyze it.
And for obvious historical preservation reasons, researchers wanted to avoid
having to destroy part of a priceless historical dagger in
(23:48):
order to figure out what it's made of. So this investigation,
which by the way, the team was made up of
both Italian and Egyptian researchers, they use non destructive methods
analyze the blade with a non destructive imaging technique called
X ray fluorescence spectrometry to determine the composition of the blade.
(24:10):
So the way that works is you bombard the blade
with some radiation they use like a portable X ray scanner.
You bombard it with some radiation and then that radiation
causes the atoms in the blade to fluoresce, to like
give off light energy as they're you know, as the
radiation hits the electrons that are orbiting the atoms and
(24:30):
then causes some of them to fall down to lower
energy levels, and that puts off radiation in return. And
by analyzing what gets reflected back, you can see what
types of elements that it's made of. And what they
found was that the composition of the blade was iron
with a high percentage of nickel and cobalt. So I
think they found that it was mostly iron, with ten
(24:54):
point eight percent by weight nickel and zero point five
to eight percent by weight cobalt, and these numbers are
not to be found in earth based iron generally. Studies
have found that earth based iron extracted from before like
the eighteen hundreds tends to always have less than four
percent nickel by waight.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Yeah, yeah, I was reading some sources about this as well,
and yeah, a lot of it seems to come back
to the nickel.
Speaker 3 (25:19):
Though I've read some criticisms that you shouldn't go by
the nickel alone, and that to really be sure you
should look at like some other comparison points as well,
like the ratio of nickel to cobalt. I think some
other things as well.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
Yeah, there was one paper I was looking at Albert
Jambond from twenty seventeen Bronze Age iron meteoritic or not,
And this is the additional subheading subtitle a chemical strategy.
And in this one they pointed out like weathering is
also sometimes something that has to be taken into place
given the nickel levels that can be detected, and it
(25:57):
may have to do with like basically a weathering away
of some of the nickel content at least on the
testable portions of an artifact.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
But from what I could tell, most researchers are pretty
well convinced by this and other recent studies. There's another
one I'm gonna mention in a second saying that this
probably really is meteorite. So speaking to the BBC, the
lead author, Daniellacomelli, who by the way, is that she's
an experimental physicist affiliated with the Polytechnic University of Milan,
(26:27):
she sounds pretty confident. She says meteoric iron is clearly
indicated by the presence of this high percentage of nickel,
and in fact, the authors of this study from twenty
sixteen even matched the composition of the blade of Tutencommon's
dagger to that of a known meteorite in the region,
one which landed about two hundred and forty kilometers west
(26:49):
of the city of Alexandria. They also argue that the
blade shows what they call a high manufacturing quality, which
is not found in some of the other simple article
facts made out of meteorite iron from this period in Egypt.
So it shows that someone at this time had the
ability to work with iron at a high level. But
(27:10):
this type type of craftsmanship must have been rare.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
Yeah, yeah, rare craftsmanship befitting of a rare material. There's
there's one little bit I want to side here. This
is from the Brian and Fagan book The Seventy Great
Inventions of the Ancient World. Paul Ti Krattic is the
main writer on a chapter in that that deals with
with iron and other metals, and Kradick mentions the dagger
(27:38):
of tutan Common and there's an excellent photo of it
in that book. But then he adds an additional detail
from the following century. So this is a different culture
because as we've already mentioned, there there are other examples
of meteoric iron being used in you know, in very regal,
(27:59):
very ornamental pieces like this and this one, this particular
one is referred to in a letter. This is from
twelve fifty BCE. We have a letter from the Hittite
ruler Tatusilius the third to the king of Assyria, and
in this letter he apologizes for not being able to
(28:19):
supply iron and instead hopes that the gift of a
single accompanying iron blade will be acceptable Socratic rights quote.
So in twelve fifty BC, a single iron blade from
the one available source of iron was an appropriate placiatory
gift to another monarch. So, I mean you can also
(28:42):
see that in the fact that, yeah, King tut is
buried with one of these blades, you know, within his wrappings.
But you know, here's this other case where it's like
it just it just more evidence that like these things
were so highly valued.
Speaker 4 (28:54):
These are the.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
Kind of things that kings gave to each other, you know,
these are the kind of things that kings were buried with.
But Kradack also points out that mere centuries later iron
making industry would end up stretching across Eurasia. So again,
iron ore is very common, but it is the last
metal of antiquity to be smelted, due in part to
(29:16):
the high melting point.
Speaker 3 (29:18):
Yeah, I'm almost trying to imagine. I mean, I get
the change took place. I suppose over a long enough
period of time that you wouldn't have really had stuff
like this, I guess, But I'm imagining somebody clutching extremely valuable,
you know, precious iron artifacts of a ceremonial value, and
then suddenly, like the you know, the iron working and
(29:38):
the iron smelting comes into vogue, and now iron is
all over the place, and it's just it's not the
same anymore.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
Yeah, but they would still have the appeal of having
this source that is associated with the sky as having
come from heaven or from the cosmos and the gods
and so forth. And that is something that I've I've
seen reference in some other sources that I'll probably come
back to later on that, certainly in the Chinese examples,
(30:07):
you know, the Chinese, the ancient Chinese were aware of meteorites,
that they knew about these various events, and they wrote
about them in their early literature, and therefore there was
likely this connection in place. So it was this precious
metal that was unlike the metal used for other tools
and so forth, unlike even other precious metals and other
(30:32):
stones and so forth that were used. But then there
was also the story behind it, the idea that it
has some sort of connection to the cosmos.
Speaker 3 (30:40):
I want to get to something about that story within
an Egyptian context in just a minute. But first I
promised I was going to mention another study on the
meteor origin of the iron in the blade. So the
other study I wanted to point out was from twenty
twenty two. This is in the journal I think the
same journal, Yeah, same journal Media and Planetary Science, And
(31:02):
this is by Takafumi Matsui at All, and it's called
the Manufacture and Origin of the Tuton Common Metiorritic Iron Dagger.
And this paper further supports the conclusion that the iron
in the King's Dagger is from a meteorite, and not
only that adds evidence about what kind of meteorite and
so the author's right quote. Here we report non destructive
(31:26):
two dimensional chemical analysis of the Tuton Common iron dagger
conducted at the Egyptian Museum of Cairo. Elemental mapping of
nickel on the dagger blade surface shows discontinuous banded arrangements
in places with cubic symmetry and a bandwidth of about
one millimeters, suggesting a Vidmin stotton pattern. Remember that, Yeah, ah, yeah,
(31:49):
So the intermediate nickel content with the presence of the
Vidmin stotton pattern implies the source meteorite of the dagger
blade to be octahedrite. So again that's the octahedron the
d eight die. Furthermore, they say that the quote randomly
distributed sulfur rich black spots are likely remnants of troylite
(32:11):
inclusions in iron meteorite. So remember those black spots I
mentioned on the dagger that I said looked like lunar maria,
You know, those strange kind of geographical looking depressions and
dark spots. These authors conclude that those are probably sulfur
rich troylite inclusions, little impurities in the original metal made
(32:34):
of mineral iron sulfide and so iron sulfide.
Speaker 4 (32:38):
By the way, you.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
Ever boil a hard boiled egg too long and it
ends up with a green cake forming around the yolk.
That's iron sulfide. I think hydrogen sulfide in the egg
white reacts with iron and the egg yolk and makes
iron sulfide. So yeah, that's what that gross green stuff is.
Speaker 4 (32:58):
It's not gonna hurt you. You can still eat it.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
You are not a fan of green eggs.
Speaker 3 (33:02):
Well, no, I'm fine with a full green eggs. I
don't love the green case around the yolk. I feel
like you boiled that too long.
Speaker 4 (33:10):
That's a no, no, okay.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
I won't do any of the follow up questions about
whether you would need it with a goat and so forth.
Speaker 4 (33:18):
I need anything with a goat.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
You know.
Speaker 3 (33:20):
Goat's just good company that makes even unpalatable food.
Speaker 4 (33:23):
Fine, Yes, they are quite amusing anyway.
Speaker 3 (33:26):
The authors of the paper argue that the Vidmans dot
and pattern and the Troy light inclusions, the fact that
those were preserved, these things together indicate that the iron
was probably forged and worked at low temperatures of less
than nine hundred and fifty degrees celsius. They also even
use material analysis to not just say, like what physically
(33:48):
the stagger is, but to connect it to some historical documents.
I don't think they were the first people to make
this connection, but they used some material analysis to kind
of back it up. So the authors here argued that
this dagger was quite possibly a gift given to Tutenkommon's
likely grandfather, Amenhotep the third, from the kingdom of Mitani
(34:13):
in Anatolia, because there is a tablet mentioning such a
gift among Egyptian records. There's a tablet that says, you know,
they're they're sending a gift to Amenhotep the third and
it's described as an iron dagger with a golden hilt.
And then the bit of material evidence that backs this
up is that there is lime plaster used to glue
(34:36):
jim stones to the gold hilt, and that lime plaster
glue is characteristic of Mitani craftsmanship rather than Egyptian, which
tended to use gypsum plaster instead. So this dagger, wrapped
up with the body of King Tut inside his wrappings
laying on his thigh, seems to have been made out
of metal that came from a meteorite, and it's a
(34:59):
good guessed that this was a gift to King Tut's
grandfather from Anatolia.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
Wow, now some of you are probably wondering, well, which
god was in charge of all of this, So a
brief sidebar here on this in general. For this I
turned once more to Geraldine Pinch's book and Egyptian Mythology,
and essentially we should probably point out, yeah, that the
Egyptian god associated with metal working is the god Taw.
(35:27):
And not only is Ta associated with metalworking, he's also
held up as a kind of creator deity. And some
of these traditions said to have designed and crafted the world,
to have smelt the new lands, and I found this interesting.
Made bodies for the kings of Egypt out of electrum, copper,
and iron bodies according to Pinch, that were presumably made
(35:52):
so that they could occupy those bodies in the lands
beyond death, So this would be like your resurrected metal
body for the next one world. He Ta here, though
is often described as being beautiful of face. His skin
is often described as being blue, though I've also seen
it green in some depictions. He wears an artisan's cap,
(36:13):
and he is associated with dwarves, perhaps to the to
the fact that dwarves were often employed in gym working,
and this on its own is a pretty fascinating topic.
The role of dwarves in ancient Egypt. There are a
few different papers on this. Some of these individuals worked
in entertainment or as personal attendants. Others were animal tenders
(36:35):
and indeed jewelers. But also there were individuals of the
Old Kingdom who rose to high rank and status and
were buried as such. And we're able, you know, to
tell they had that status because of the way they
were buried. So it's it's often argued that cultural acceptance
was pretty high for them. And and Ta was ultimately
just one of multiple gods held to have a dwarf
(36:55):
in form of one sort or another. And Ta also
would later be equated with Hephaestus by the Greeks, though
of course Hephaestus was not beautiful of face, I think
in most traditions.
Speaker 3 (37:17):
So meteorites have of course been found by people since prehistory,
but how often did we actually understand what they were
and where they came from. Just one example of people
not generally accepting that meteorites came from outer space is
European scientists up until the early nineteenth century. There's a
(37:37):
good summary of this history of like the debate about
the origin of meteorites in the book Cosmic Horizons, edited
by Steven Soda and Neil deGrasse Tyson. I think it
was published in the year two thousand and The short
version of the story is that there have long been
reports from people, you know, seeing fireballs in the sky
(37:59):
or hearing explode, then finding rocks that they believed had
fallen from above. But as of the late eighteenth century,
most scientists of the European Enlightenment doubted that stones actually
fell from the sky, or if they did believe it,
they thought maybe that the stones, you know, came from
somewhere on Earth. They couldn't have come from outer space.
(38:19):
Maybe they were thrown from a distant volcano, or maybe
they were picked up and tossed by a hurricane far away.
Because at the time there was a sort of a dogma.
There was a convention that space, apart from the planets
and the comets, was empty. You know, you got the Earth,
you got the Sun, the planets, the stars, the comets,
(38:41):
but other than that, it's just empty out there. There's
not like stuff flying around. However, a German physicist by
the name of Ernst Kladney, who lived seventeen fifty six
to eighteen twenty seven published a book in the year
seventeen ninety four arguing that these reports were accurate and
that rocks and pieces of iron actually do sometimes fall
(39:02):
from the sky, in some cases creating fireballs and explosions
as they are heated by friction traveling through the atmosphere.
Cladney was an interesting guy. He was a lawyer by training,
but he was also very into music and acoustics, and
he discovered a way of visualizing sound waves by putting
(39:24):
dust or powder on a plate and then vibrating the
plate by rubbing it with a violin bow, and so
the powder would range itself into these patterns that were
related to the sound waves produced. Cladney went about collecting
eyewitness reports of fireballs and meteorite falls from the sky,
and he tried to evaluate them for credibility and see
(39:46):
what could be learned from them, and eventually he concluded
that yes, rocks really do fall from space. One thing
he did was use descriptions of fireballs to estimate the
speed at which these rocks were entering the Earth's atmosphere,
and he realized they must be going much faster than
could be accounted for by the Earth's gravity alone, so
(40:09):
they're not simply falling, but they must be flying through
space at extreme velocities. And this connected with the fact
that when these alleged rocks were found, they looked scorched
all over. The friction of entering the atmosphere at these
high speeds melted their outer shells, and so he looked
into it. He published this book in seventeen ninety four,
and it was initially met with skepticism by his peers
(40:31):
by European scientists, but many scientists updated their beliefs due
to new emerging evidence. They sort of got lucky with
some things, some documented events that really backed up his argument,
including a widely reported meteor fall near Siena, Italy, just
a couple of months after the book was published, another
(40:52):
one in England which included an eyewitness account of a
farmer who claimed a black rock hit the earth only
thirty feet away from him and caused an explosion in
the mud that splattered all over his body. And then
there was another one in Normandy in eighteen oh three,
which was extensively documented by the French physicist to Jean
(41:12):
Baptiste bo which included reports of a fireball as well
as an elliptical impact area that had many weird stones
within it. And so these reports were supplemented by chemical
and mineral analysis of some of these meteorite samples, and
it turned out that these samples were unlike any rocks
or metal ores known of on Earth. For example, the
(41:35):
rocks contained what they called at the time globules. These
are now known as chondrules, their little round grains within
the structure of the rock that began as molten droplets
of minerals in space, and then a crete together within asteroids.
Also connecting to what we've already found, they discovered that
(41:55):
iron meteorrite fragments contained levels of nickel that had never
been obsor in Earth based iron. And then, finally another
piece of evidence was the discovery of the first asteroid,
the Dwarf Planet series in eighteen oh one, which suggested
that space between the planets and the comets was not empty.
There were lots of rocky things floating around out there,
(42:18):
and some of them might occasionally land on Earth, and
that was in fact what meteorites were. So it was
more than one hundred years after Newton's principia that the
true origin of meteorites was widely accepted among European scientists.
But that brings me to an article that I wanted
to talk about to address the question of what the
(42:39):
ancient Egyptians knew. So I was reading an article in
the anthropology magazine Sapiens written by an Egyptologist who named
Victoria Almansa Vilatro. This is from twenty twenty three, and
if Almansa Villatoro's argument is correct, the fact that meteorites
come from space or from the sky was known to
the ancient Egyptians. Just one cool example she mentions in
(43:02):
the article is there's an interesting inscription in hieroglyphics inside
the pyramid of Unus at Sakara. Unus was the last
pharaoh of the Fifth Dynasty during Egypt's Old Kingdom, and
he ruled in the middle of the twenty fourth century BCE,
so like forty four hundred years ago, and the sentence
(43:23):
from the pyramid text reads, Eunus the king seizes the
sky and splits its iron. Now, this article in Sapiens
is based somewhat on Almansa Villatorro's academic publication in the
Journal of Egyptian Archaeology from twenty nineteen called the cultural
Indexicality of the n forty one sign for beat this. Oh,
(43:46):
this's got some strange characters. BJ three sort of is
what it looks like the metal of the sky and
the sky of metal. Now this includes a lot of
linguistic arguments that are way over my head, but I
was just going through to get the main point and
pull out some details. And one of the things I
wanted to get to I wanted to mention briefly just
because I thought it was interesting before getting to remain
(44:08):
conclusions or about the religious and ceremonial functions of iron.
All Monts of Villaturo mentions in the paper that pre
Iron Age iron artifacts are associated in Egypt with an
elaborate funerary ritual known as the opening of the Mouth,
which was a sort of ceremony performed over a dead body.
(44:28):
I think often of a king or a ruler, but
a ceremony over a body that seems to be sort
of activated the powers of life beyond death. It's sort
of like turning on afterlife mode to give you the
powers of like eating and drinking and speaking in the afterlife.
And I briefly got very interested in this. So this
was not in the paper, but I went looking for
(44:49):
a text of the spoken part of the opening of
the mouth ceremony. I think there are a lot of
different versions of this, but the one I found in
particular was a translation of the ritual from the two
Zoum Chapel of rech Mirah, which involved like dedicating a
statue of the dead, and the text includes the following lines, Uh,
(45:09):
there's a letter, a capital letter in here which just
refers to the name of the dead. So when you
hear in, you think of the name of the dead.
It goes, I have balanced your mouth and bones for you.
In I have opened your mouth for you. In I
open your mouth for you with the new uplade. I
have opened your mouth for you with the new uplade.
(45:30):
The mesca hetch you blade of iron that opens the
mouths of gods. Horace is the opener of the mouth
of N.
Speaker 4 (45:37):
Horace.
Speaker 3 (45:38):
Horace has opened the mouth of N. Horace has opened
the mouth of N with that which he opened the
mouth of his father, with which he opened the mouth
of Osiris, with the iron that came from Seth. The
mesketch you blade of iron with which the mouths of
gods are opened. May you open the mouth of N with.
Speaker 1 (45:57):
It nice and we get that connection back to Osiris,
who we talked about previously on the show. This is
interesting too because then when I was researching ta who
I talked about earlier, the Egyptian god associated with the craftsmanship.
There was also mention in Pinch's work about the opening
of the mouth ceremony and elsewhere in the book she
(46:19):
talks about the Horus connection and so forth. But it
seems like Tad did have some sort of connection to
this as well, and she mentions that it was used
for mummies but also for sculptures, and maybe given his
craftsmanship angle, he's more aligned with that end of it.
I'm not entirely certain, but yeah, imbuing life into the sculpture,
(46:41):
embodying it somehow, and like you said, perhaps turning on
after life mode for the mummified body of an important person.
Speaker 3 (46:51):
But also very interesting that implements specifically of iron are
associated with this ritual, that it has some kind of
mythical or ritual potency here. So all months of Laturo
in this article gets into the fact that before the
widespread or large scale smelting of iron and iron working
within Egypt, there are still these these iron artifacts that
(47:13):
are thought to be made primarily of iron sourced from meteorites,
and that they almost always again serve this more ceremonial
or decorative function. They are either objects of kind of
wealth and power and decoration, they symbolize status maybe or
that they have this religious significance. But anyway, I wanted
(47:37):
to come back to the core question of like, what
is the evidence that the ancient Egyptians actually understood that
this meteoritic iron or meteorite iron came from the sky.
And so she writes in the second millennium BCE, the
Egyptian word or phrase used to refer to iron was
a phrase that literally can mean the metal of the
(47:59):
sky or the iron of the sky, and there are
early known Egyptian associations between iron and the sky. So
you've got the pyramid pyramid text which are texts inscribed
on the inner walls of the pyramids where the Egyptian
kings and queens of the fifth to eighth dynasties of
the Old Kingdom were buried. This would cover a period
(48:22):
of like forty one hundred to forty four hundred years
ago or so. These texts included incantations that would be
recited by priests to guide the dead rulers into the afterlife,
and the Pyramid texts describe a really interesting cosmology, really
interesting picture of how the universe was shaped. And in
(48:43):
her work, almnts of Llatro argues that the way they
described the sky should be pictured as a giant iron
bowl with water in it, and water can fall from
the bowl. I guess that's rain, but also chunks of
the iron bowl is self can fall to the earth,
and these would be iron meteorites. Now the author admits
(49:06):
that it's not obvious this is what's being described. You
have to sort of decode a linked system of metaphors
within the glyphs of the Egyptian language. She writes, quote,
in the Pyramid texts, the word for iron is written
with a hieroglyph that represents a hemispherical container of water.
How the Egyptians perceived the sky. Iron and sky are
(49:28):
interchangeable in the texts, which is why passages describe the
dead saling the iron and the king needing to break
an iron barrier to reach the sky. And then she
documents how there are also links between the concept of
iron and the concept of water, because remember, in many
ancient cosmologies, people sort of believe the sky was in
(49:49):
some sense full of water, and so maybe when it rains,
that's water leaking out of the waters above. And so
Almans of Vulatora writes that the goddess Newt personified the sky.
But also at this period there are religious texts explaining
the belief that in the afterlife a dead royal would
return to the waters of Newts Uterus, and so this
(50:14):
sign used for iron is also associated with the word
for uterus and the word for well, like water well.
And so she admits there might be legitimate reasons for
doubting this interpretation that these associations mean that the Egyptians
knew that iron meteorites came from the sky. And one
(50:34):
is the simple question of, like, how likely is it
in a given space and time period that someone would
be able to like have the like witness a meteorite falling,
which itself is a fairly rare event, witness it falling,
and then have it be lucky enough that it lands
very physically close that you can close enough that you
(50:56):
can go find the physical meteorite and then associate it
with the falling you saw from above, and put all
that information together and then also pass it on for
it to become general cultural knowledge. You know, that would
take a sort of like a lucky confluence of events
that themselves might be fairly rare, but you know, it
(51:19):
happens often enough that there are records of other times
in places where people did see something falling and then
they claim to have found a stone or something. So
it's certainly not impossible. And in the case of ancient Egypt,
it seems like there's this linguistic and literary evidence that
would help support that idea that people did have this
cultural knowledge making a link between iron and the sky
(51:42):
and the waters above.
Speaker 1 (51:44):
Yeah yeah, and then again perhaps throwing in the you know,
the idea of the desert being an ideal place to
spot them in the dark stone standing out against the
lighter colored sand, and so forth. May come back to
meteor hunting a little bit in subsequent episodes to explore
this this aspect of everything a bit more.
Speaker 4 (52:06):
Yeah yeah.
Speaker 3 (52:07):
One more thing she knows that I think is interesting
is this is not totally unique to the Egyptian language.
She also notes that there is a similar sort of
linguistic link in ancient Sumerian, which also characterizes iron as
sort of the metal of the sky.
Speaker 1 (52:23):
Excellent, excellent. Well, in the next episode, I think we're
going to get into some more examples. We're gonna we're
gonna keep exploring the overall topic, but we'll also get
into some other specific examples from other cultures. Well, we'll
sort of ask some of the same questions of Chinese traditions.
You know, did they know that this iron came from above?
(52:45):
And what did that mean to them? And so forth. So, yeah,
there are a lot of additional interesting angles to explore,
and there are some other other examples and alleged examples
of meteoric iron being used in artifacts that are related
to to cultures that I didn't even know how to
tradition of using such substances. So it'll be it'll be
(53:06):
fascinating to continue to.
Speaker 4 (53:07):
Explore this, no doubt. I'm excited.
Speaker 1 (53:10):
Yeah, So in the meantime, if you have thoughts on
this topic, if you if there are specific examples you
want to get in there early and say yes, make
sure you cover this, go ahead and hit us with it.
You know, we're we're in we're still in research mode here,
we're still writing up the notes. So you know there's
time to get it in there, and if not, it's
something we can discuss on our listener mail episodes. Our
(53:32):
listener mail episodes published Mondays in the Stuff to Blow
Your Mind podcast feed Our core episodes are on Tuesdays
and Thursdays. Short form episode on Wednesdays and on Fridays.
We set aside most serious concerns to just talk about
a weird film on Weird House Cinema. You can follow
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(53:54):
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(54:15):
do we decided discord was called a server? Perhaps, well,
you can like that, Email us and we'll send you
the link so that you can go there.
Speaker 3 (54:25):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hi.
You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (54:47):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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