King Tut's Jewelry and Other Bronze Age Treasures Contain Meteorites

Dagger of Emperor Jahangir, Mughal dynasty, 1621, India. The watered steel blade contains meteoric iron, iron hilt, and a gold inlay.

King Tutankhamun, Mughal Emperor Jahangir, and the legendary King Arthur all had at least one thing in common: They wielded swords made out meteoric iron.

The sturdy metal then and now inspires admiration and awe, given that it is a native metal found in meteorites, which fell from the sky and landed on Earth. It is possible that one of the world's most sacred religious objects, the Black Stone at the Grand Mosque in Mecca, contains the mystical metal, but scientists continue to debate the stone's composition.

New research, however, has just confirmed that multiple Bronze Age artifacts, including King Tut's dagger, bracelet, and headrest, contain meteoric iron. The paper, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, describes a new geochemical approach for evaluating iron to determine if it was derived from a meteorite or smelting.

In short, the technique can distinguish extraterrestrial from terrestrial iron.

"I show that there is not a single piece of evidence for smelting in the Bronze Age on the one hand, and on the other that all Bronze Age artifacts analyzed properly are made of meteoric iron," author Albert Jambon of the French National Center for Scientific Research, the Sorbonne, and the University of Côte D'Azur told Seeker. "Once they discovered smelting, this is what we call the Iron Age," he continued. "The ability to smelt took some time to propagate from the Near East to north, west, east, and south."

Albert Jambon analyzing a meteorite at Poznan University, Poland

It is not just a novelty then to identify meteorite materials in ancient objects. The research is helping to determine precisely when and where iron smelting first occurred. As Jambon said, "Archaeologists think this happened somewhere in the Near East, sometime about 1200 BC, but we don't know for sure."

The various ages in time named after materials — such as the Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age — all marked technological advancements that changed the way people made tools, weapons, and dwellings. Just as the Computer Age has changed life as we know it, so too did these different periods affect everything from warfare to cooking.

Since iron smelting requires precise heating and melting of its oxide ore, its emergence marked a great innovation that also affected working with other base metals. The metals that make bronze are more easily recovered from their ores, and the resulting alloy in ancient times was soft enough to be easily worked with tools available then. These properties of bronze led to its namesake age, which lasted from about 3200–500 B.C., depending on the region.

Some historians have claimed that Bronze Age irons were smelted. To investigate the matter, Jambon studied a variety of artifacts containing iron from that time. They included beads from Gerzeh (Egypt, 3200 BC), a dagger from Alaca Höyük (Turkey, 2500 BC), a pendant from Umm el-Marra (Syria, 2300 BC), an axe from Ugarit (Syria, 1400 BC), several items from the Shang Dynasty civilization (China, 1400 BC), and the dagger, bracelet, and headrest of Tutankhamen (Egypt, 1350 BC).

Albert Jambon analyzing Bronze Age artifacts at Poznan University, Poland

Jambon conducted a non-destructive chemical analysis of each item utilizing a portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometer. He determined that the artifacts were made with meteoric iron, which he said has higher levels of nickel and cobalt, and exhibits no signs of having undergone smelting.

While the artifacts all passed the test, Jambon admitted that severely corroded meteorite iron can be difficult to distinguish from smelted iron. The incomplete corrosion of some of the artifacts still permitted analysis of their composition.

Jambon said working with iron from meteors required cold-hammering it or heating it before hammering. Egyptian tablets, he said, mention that metals were "taken from the furnace" before shaped into objects. Gold likely received a similar treatment.

"Bronze Age people were skillful jewelers, using not only gold, but also silver," Jambon said. "Meteorite iron is often associated with gold."

Close-up of an iron-containing meteorite. The surface features numerous thumbprint-like impressions known as regmaglypts that were formed as the meteor passed through Earth's atmosphere.

In fact, the cost of iron during the Bronze Age was ten times that of gold due to its rarity. According to the Meteoritical Bulletin Database, there are only about 1,000 documented records of iron-containing meteorites. Their weights range from 60 tons to less than half an ounce.

"Most of them are 'finds,' meaning that nobody witnessed the falling meteorite, which could be as old as tens of thousands of years," Jambon said.

In the future, he and other scientists hope to be able to link meteoric iron to its source meteors. He is also hoping to better pinpoint when and where the first iron smelting occurred.

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