Dagger in Tutankhamun's tomb was made with iron from a meteorite

A dagger entombed with King Tutankhamun was made with iron from a meteorite, a new analysis on the metal composition shows.

In 1925, archaeologist Howard Carter found two daggers, one iron and one with a blade of gold, within the wrapping of the teenage king, who was mummified more than 3,300 years ago. The iron blade, which had a gold handle, rock crystal pommel and lily and jackal-decorated sheath, has puzzled researchers in the decades since Carter’s discovery: ironwork was rare in ancient Egypt, and the dagger’s metal had not rusted.

Italian and Egyptian researchers analysed the metal with an x-ray fluorescence spectrometer to determine its chemical composition, and found its high nickel content, along with its levels of cobalt, “strongly suggests an extraterrestrial origin”. They compared the composition with known meteorites within 2,000km around the Red Sea coast of Egypt, and found similar levels in one meteorite.

That meteorite, named Kharga, was found 150 miles (240km) west of Alexandria, at the seaport city of Mersa Matruh, which in the age of Alexander the Great – the fourth century BC – was known as Amunia.

The researchers published their findings on Tuesday in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science.

Although people have worked with copper, bronze and gold since 4,000BC, ironwork came much later, and was rare in ancient Egypt. In 2013, nine blackened iron beads, excavated from a cemetery near the Nile in northern Egypt, were found to have been beaten out of meteorite fragments, and also a nickel-iron alloy. The beads are far older than the young pharaoh, dating to 3,200BC.

“As the only two valuable iron artifacts from ancient Egypt so far accurately analysed are of meteoritic origin,” the team that studied the knife wrote, “we suggest that ancient Egyptians attributed great value to meteoritic iron for the production of fine ornamental or ceremonial objects”.

The researchers also stood with a hypothesis that ancient Egyptians placed great importance on rocks falling from the sky. They suggested that the finding of a meteorite-made dagger adds meaning to the use of the term “iron” in ancient texts, and noted around the 13th century BC, a term “literally translated as ‘iron of the sky’ came into use … to describe all types of iron”.

“Finally, somebody has managed to confirm what we always reasonably assumed,” Thilo Rehren, an archaeologist with University College London, told the Guardian.

Rehren, who studied the nine meteoritic beads, said “there never has been a reason to doubt this outcome but we were never really able to put this hard data behind it”.

He added that other objects from Tutankhamun’s tomb, including jewelry and miniature daggers, are believed to made from meteorite iron.

“Yes, the Egyptians referred to this stuff as metal from the heaven, which is purely descriptive,” he said. “What I find impressive is that they were capable of creating such delicate and well manufactured objects in a metal of which they didn’t have much experience.”

An iron meteorite, by James St. John (Flickr: Murnpeowie Meteorite) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The researchers wrote in the new study: “The introduction of the new composite term suggests that the ancient Egyptians were aware that these rare chunks of iron fell from the sky already in the 13th [century] BCE, anticipating Western culture by more than two millennia.”

Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley, of the University of Manchester, has similarly argued that ancient Egyptians would have revered celestial objects that had plunged to earth.

“The sky was very important to the ancient Egyptians,” she told Nature, apropos of her work on the meteoritic beads. “Something that falls from the sky is going to be considered as a gift from the gods.”

The high quality of the blade suggests that Tutankhamun, who lived during the latest stage of the Bronze Age, was supported by ironworkers who were skilled despite the relative rarity of the material.

The blade may not be the only item derived from falling rocks on Tut’s person.

In 2006, an Austrian astrochemist proposed that an unusual yellowish gem, shaped as a scarab in King Tut’s burial necklace, is actually glass formed in the heat of a meteorite crashing into sand.

“It would be very interesting to analyse more pre-Iron Age artifacts, such as other iron objects found in King Tut’s tomb,” Daniela Comelli, of the physics department at Milan Polytechnic, told Discovery News. “We could gain precious insights into metal working technologies in ancient Egypt and the Mediterranean.”

For more information visit:-

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/01/dagger-king-tut-tomb-iron-meteorite-egypt-mummy

http://www.prlabs.co.uk/lab-supplies.php?N=iron-1000ppm-for-icp&Id=60139

Iron meteorites 'buried in Antarctica' by the Sun

New research suggests there could be a layer of iron-rich meteorites hidden just under the Antarctic ice.

The churning of glaciers spews many space rocks out on to the surface in Antarctica, but compared to elsewhere on Earth, few of them are made of iron.

Based on modelling and lab experiments, scientists say the missing metallic rocks might be burying themselves, by melting the ice as sunlight heats them.

To prove their idea, the team now wants to look for the rocks themselves.

"The study is proposing a hypothesis - these samples should be there. We just have to go and locate them," said Dr Katherine Joy from the University of Manchester, a co-author of the paper published in Nature Communications.

Antarctica is known by meteorite specialists as a fruitful hunting ground, because the rocks are collected from their landing sites by glacial flows and transported to concentrated dumping-grounds.

"The great thing about Antarctica is they fall on the ice, and then the ice progressively moves away from the plateau. And where it hits these barriers, along the Transantarctic Mountains, the ice gets moved up," Dr Joy told the BBC.

"So this continuous conveyor belt has delivered meteorites from the interior fall sites to the 'meteorite stranding zones' for the past couple of million years or so."

Iron meteorites. By Waifer X (originally posted to Flickr as 090423-1080887) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Among this Antarctic haul, however, researchers have noticed that iron-rich meteorites - whether partly or wholly made of the metal - are surprisingly scarce, compared to the percentage collected in other places around the world.

Dr Joy and her colleagues think they may have discovered why.

They froze two small meteorites of similar size and shape, one made of iron and the other rocky and non-metallic, inside blocks of ice. A special lamp was trained on the ice from above, to mimic the rays of the Sun.

Both meteorites, on repeated trials, melted their way downward through the ice block. But because the metal conducts heat more efficiently, the iron meteorite sank further, faster.

The researchers then expanded that observation using a mathematical simulation. Their model showed that this Sun-driven burrowing would be enough to cause iron-rich rocks to sink so much during the long summer days that, over the course of the year, it would account fairly precisely for the lack of iron space rocks welling their way to the surface of the Antarctic "stranding zones".

"The idea is, they never make it to the surface. They're forever trapped, 50-100cm or so below the ice," Dr Joy explained.

That means, if the team's findings are to be believed, that the hunt is on.

As Dr Joy's Manchester colleague Geoffrey Evatt put it: "The challenge is now set - to be the first team to locate this reserve of meteorites and retrieve samples from it."

Of all the meteorites gathered from Antarctica, only a handful - so far - have been pulled out from beneath the ice. This is mostly for practical reasons, Dr Joy said.

"When it's very cold... picking up the sample in a controlled way is difficult enough with things sitting on the surface. To access ones that are subsurface - nobody's really tried to do that so far."

So it will not be easy, but the team hopes that radar and metal detectors might help target the search. And the potential rewards are high.

"Every meteorite we find tells us something new about the Solar System," Dr Joy said.

Some are carbon-rich or rocky remnants from long before any planet clumped together; others - like iron and rocky-iron meteorites - offer clues from a more intermediate stage, when baby planets with cores, mantles and crusts were trying to form.

"The iron group represents meteorites that were once the cores and the internal structures of different planetesimals.

"We think there were probably hundreds of these early planets, that formed in the solar system but never really got big enough and were broken up in collision events."

For more information visit:-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35587680

http://www.prlabs.co.uk/lab-supplies.php?N=iron-1000ppm-for-icp&Id=60140

Meteorite from birth of solar system to go on display

An extremely rare meteorite that has the same make-up as the primordial solar system goes on public display for the first time on Friday at the Natural History Museum in London.

The Ivuna meteorite landed in Tanzania in 1938 and has since been broken up into samples, the rest of which remain in the hands of private collectors. The Natural History Museum bought the largest lump in 2008 from a private enthusiast in the US.

The black, satsuma-sized space rock dates back to the birth of the solar system some 4.6bn years ago, before the Earth had formed. It is one of only five in the world with a ratio of chemical elements that, save for hydrogen and helium, almost exactly matches that of the sun.

The meteorite is a carbonaceous chondrite and has a lot of water locked up in its minerals. Up to a fifth of the rock’s weight is bound water, with other constituents being organic compounds that are considered the building blocks of life.

Meteorites like the Ivuna rock may have brought water and vital compounds for life on Earth when they slammed into the surface of the fledgling planet billions of years ago.

Ashley King, a postdoctoral researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, said: “These meteorites are a unique record of conditions that existed at the time over 4.5 billion years ago, before the Earth had formed. They are the primordial building blocks of our Solar System.”

When carbonaceous chondrites reach the Earth, they start to react in the air. But the museum’s Ivuna sample has been stored in a case in pure nitrogen for most of its life to preserve the pristine material.

Researchers at the Natural History Museum believe that studying the meteorite might give them a more accurate record of the sun’s composition than measuring the sun’s surface itself.

“Ivuna is actively used in our research, and it is fantastic to be able to show visitors a unique specimen that is older than Earth itself,” said King. The speciment will go on display at the museum’s free after-hours event, Science Uncovered, on 25 September.

Sara Russell, head of mineral and planetary sciences at the museum, said the Ivuna meteorite had recently been used to cast doubt on claims that the orbiting XMM-Newton observatory had seen dark matter streaming from a distant cluster of galaxies.

“It highlights that we need to learn more about our own galactic back yard. By studying the solar system we can learn abut how matter behaves in distant galaxies. At the Natural History Museum, we are using meteorites such as Ivuna, which dates from a time before planets existed, to understand the composition of primordial material at that time,” she said.

For more information visit:-

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/sep/22/meteorite-from-birth-of-solar-system-to-go-on-display

https://www.prlabs.co.uk/lab-supplies.php?N=helium-emptied-cylinder&Id=60491