From the Vault: Meteoric Metal and Alien Iron, Part 1
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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 5-7-2024. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

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 meteorite iron. 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. Yeah.

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, 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 1320.

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 gonna be looking at in this episode, I just wanted to share a couple of quotes to perhaps help put this timeframe in perspective and even cast a different light on civilization 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 applicable across the board.

So this first one is a quote from John Key in his book, A History of China. He writes, quote, Indeed, 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 bronzeware. 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 this other quote is from Joseph Needham, whose work we've discussed in the show before, from Science and Society in Ancient China. Quote,

What I like about these two quotes is I think they help 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, 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, of writing systems, enhanced weaponry, and much more.

And it's not merely the time before iron. It is the time that gave birth to iron technology as well.

Well, and I think that 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 is is once you have the technology to smelt it and then work it in the high temperatures you need, it is easier to produce at mass scales and cheaper. Yeah.

Yeah, and 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.

But you can make more of them. Right, right. But eventually, of course, iron comes to dominate. Especially in the form of steel. Yes. I know some will say steel isn't strong, flesh is strong, yada, yada, yada. But steel is pretty strong.

Well, 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 Tutankhamun. So

So the tomb of the 18th dynasty Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen was uncovered by the British archaeologist Howard Carter and his team in 1922. Tutankhamen reigned from 1361 to 1352 BCE, becoming king around the age of nine or so and ruling until his early death around the age of 18.

Tutankhamen is thought to have been a son of the pharaoh Akhenaten, though from what I understand, this relationship is not totally certain. There is a DNA relationship to another mummy that has been found that is presumed to be Akhenaten, but it's not known for sure. Akhenaten, his likely father, was notable for trying to replace the traditional polytheistic religion of Egypt with

with a, it's debatable how to characterize this, but a monotheistic or monaltoristic 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 Aten, which took the form of the disk of the sun.

We've talked about that sort of attempt to go one god early in Egypt before. But this shift did not last long after Akhenaten's death. And one of Tutankhamen's main accomplishments as pharaoh seems to have been the restoration of the old polytheistic cults. Yeah, the rejection of New Coke and the reacceptance of Old Coke. Playing the hits, getting the old gang together. Mm-hmm.

So Tutankhamun's tomb was considered a very special discovery in the 20th 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

were still in place. And 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 Tutankhamen's 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 speculated that Tutankhamen's tomb was relatively well-preserved

because the entrance got like covered up by stuff and people pretty quickly forgot where it was. And so when this tomb was rediscovered in the 20th 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 in the tomb, I just wanted to read directly from the diary entry of Howard Carter describing the day of November 26, 1922, 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 sometime before one could see. The hot air escaping caused the candle to flicker. But 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 carnavon said to me can you see anything i replied to him yes it is wonderful i then with precaution made the hole 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, 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 in ornamental caskets,

flowers, alabaster vases, some beautifully executed of lotus and papyrus device, strange black shrines with a gilded monster snake appearing from within, quote,

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 lotiform wishing-cup in translucent alabaster, stools of all shapes and 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. We questioned one another as to the meaning of it all. Was it a tomb or merely a cache?

A sealed doorway between the two sentinel statues proved there was more beyond, and with the numerous cartouches bearing the name of Tutankhamen, on most of the objects before us, there was little doubt that there behind was the grave of that pharaoh. Yeah, yeah. I like the atmosphere he captures here in this description. One of my favorite things is the description of the disassembled parts of the chariot all there piled up in the tomb. Yeah.

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 1925, this was buried right along with the pharaoh's body.

One of these artifacts was a beautiful dagger. In fact, there were two daggers buried with Tutankhamun, one made 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

And 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. Yeah, it's a very splendid looking weapon. And there are no shortage of images of this. You can easily look up online. Yeah.

So the knife has a handle made out of gold with a crystal knob on the end, sort of a 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 lilies, and there's also a jackal's head.

And surprisingly, this dagger 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 metal that to me almost look like lunar maria. There are these sort of, you know, strange, beautiful little black depressions that have almost geographical looking edges. Yeah, yeah.

So this dagger made of iron was instantly quite interesting to experts because it was made of iron. Tutankhamen 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 stacks of rebar and stuff, you know, like we think of its hardness and toughness and it's 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 Tutankhamen's Egypt, the evidence 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 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

Mm-hmm.

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? I think there's sort of a more complicated answer and 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.

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 given the constraints that are laid out in the text. 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 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.

So your exploitive headline here, of course, is ancient Egyptians used 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.

Before those of you get too excited, no, this is not ancient alien stuff. No, this would be 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. 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 you know a long tradition of gathering such 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 uh what fell from the sky we've talked about the the

the phenomena of star jelly before. This is where someone sees a shooting star or thinks a meteorite has fallen in their general vicinity, and they go out into the woods and they start poking around until 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 the meteorite hunter. That's right. 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 of other planets. Sometimes there'll be an impact, 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 made of iron. There are three main types of meteorites. You've got stony meteorites, which are 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 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 5 or 6 percent of meteorite falls, but

But they are sometimes easier to find than stony meteorites. And this might be in part due to their durability and the environment and really 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 them look like really strange. Yeah, they have a very novel appearance that even the novice 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, almost like cooled liquid kind of appearance with all these dimples and creases and so forth. Why is this a metal brain the size of a bear in the middle of the desert? What is that?

Yeah.

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 tainite, which has relatively more. Within iron meteorites, these two minerals, camosite and tainite, 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 Wittmann-Stotten 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 fractal representation of a capital letter A in the English alphabet. 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. To come back to our stuff on anomalous imagery, it's 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

of an 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&D player, you just picture a D8 die. Yeah, yeah, that's scimitar damage. So the octahedral structure is created by the interaction of these two different minerals, camosite and tainite. They form 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 Wittmann-Stotten pattern.

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Now, we might come back and 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 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. There 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 here.

One is by Daniella Comelli et al. that was published in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science in the year 2016, and it's called The Meteoritic Origin of Tutankhamen'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 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 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. So they analyze the blade with a non-destructive imaging technique called X-ray fluorescence spectrometry to determine the composition of the blade.

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

As the radiation hits the electrons that are orbiting the atoms and 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 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 10.8% by weight nickel and 0.58% 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 1800s tends to always have less than 4% nickel by weight. Yeah, I was reading some sources about this as well. And a lot of it seems to come back to the nickel. 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, or some other things as well. Yeah, there was one paper I was looking at, Albert Jambon from 2017, Bronze Age Iron Manifestation.

meteoritic or not. And this is an additional subtitle, A Chemical Strategy. And in this one, they pointed out that weathering is also sometimes something that has to be taken into place given the nickel levels that can be detected. And it may have to do with basically a weathering away of some of the nickel content, at least on the testable portions of an artifact. Mm-hmm.

But from what I could tell, most researchers are pretty well convinced by this and other recent studies. There's another one I'm going to mention in a second, saying that this probably really is meteorite. So speaking to the BBC, the lead author, Daniela Comelli, who, by the way, she's an experimental physicist affiliated with the Polytechnic University of Milan. She sounds pretty confident. She says meteoric iron is clearly indicated by the presence of this high percentage of nickel in

And in fact, the authors of this study from 2016 even matched the composition of the blade of Tutankhamen's dagger to that of a known meteorite in the region, one which landed about 240 kilometers west 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 artifacts 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 this type of craftsmanship must have been rare. Yeah, yeah. Rare craftsmanship befitting of a rare material. Yeah.

There's one little bit I want to cite here. This is from the Brian M. Fagan book, The Seventy Great Inventions of the Ancient World. Paul T. Craddock is the main writer on a chapter in that that deals with iron and other metals. And Craddock mentions the dagger of Tutankhamen, 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 are other examples of

of meteoric iron being used in very regal, very ornamental pieces like this. And this particular one is referred to in a letter. This is from 1250 BCE. We have a letter from the Hittite ruler, Hottatus Silius III, to the king of Assyria.

And in this letter, he apologizes for not being able to supply iron and instead hopes that the gift of a single accompanying iron blade will be acceptable. Socratic writes, quote, So in 1250 BC, a single iron blade from the one available source of iron was an appropriate placatory gift to another monarch.

So, I mean, you can also 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. These were the kind of things that kings gave to each other. You know, these are the kind of things that kings were buried with.

But Craddock also points out that mere centuries later, ironmaking 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 the high melting point. Yeah, I'm almost...

Trying to imagine, I mean, 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, you know, the iron working and the iron smelting comes into vogue. And now iron is all over the place. And it's just it's not the same anymore. Yeah.

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 seen referenced in some other sources that I'll probably come back to later on that.

that certainly in the Chinese examples, you know, the Chinese were, the ancient Chinese were aware of meteorites. 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 metals

for other tools and so forth, unlike even other precious metals and other stones and so forth that were used.

But then there was also this the story behind it, the idea that it has some sort of connection to the cosmos. 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 the meteor origin of the iron in the blade. So the other study I wanted to point out was from 2022.

This is in the journal, I think same journal. Yeah, same journal, Meteoritics and Planetary Science. And this is by Takafumi Matsui et al. And it's called The Manufacturing Origin of the Tutankhamen Meteoritic 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 authors write, quote, Here we report non-destructive two-dimensional chemical analysis of the Tutankhamen 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 millimeter, suggesting a Wittmann-Staten pattern.

Remember that? Yeah. Ah, yeah. So the intermediate nickel content with the presence of the Wittmann-Stotten pattern implies the source meteorite of the dagger blade to be octahedrite. So again, that's the octahedron, the D8 dye. Furthermore, they say that the quote randomly distributed sulfur rich black spots are likely remnants of troilite 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 troilite inclusions, little impurities in the original metal.

made of mineral iron sulfide. And so iron sulfide, by the way, you 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 in the egg yolk and makes iron sulfide. So yeah, that's what that gross green stuff is. It's not going to hurt you. You can still eat it. You are not a fan of green eggs. Well, no, I'm fine with full green eggs. I don't love the green case around the yolk. I feel like you boiled that too long. That's a no-no. Okay.

I won't do any of the follow-up questions about whether you would eat it with a goat and so forth. I'd eat anything with a goat. You know, a goat's just good company. That makes even unpalatable food fine. Yes, they are quite amusing. Anyway, the authors of the paper argue that the Wittmann-Stotten pattern and the troilite 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 950 degrees Celsius.

They also even use material analysis to not just say like what physically 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 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 Tutankhamen's likely grandfather, Amenhotep III, from the kingdom of Mitanni in Anatolia, because there is a tablet mentioning such a gift. Among Egyptian records, there's a tablet that says they're sending a gift to Amenhotep III, 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 gemstones to the gold hilt. And that lime plaster glue is characteristic of Mitanni 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 good guess that this was a gift to King Tut's grandfather from Anatolia. 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. And for this, I turned once more to Geraldine Pinch's book on Egyptian mythology. And essentially, we should probably point out, yeah, that the Egyptian god associated with metalworking is the god Ta.

And not only is Ta associated with metalworking, he's also held up as a kind of creator deity in 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 so that they could occupy those bodies in the lands beyond death, so

So this would be like your resurrected metal body for the next 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 and

And he is associated with dwarves, perhaps due 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 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 were able to tell they had that status because of the way they were buried. So it's often argued that cultural acceptance was pretty high for them. And Ta was ultimately just one of multiple gods held to have a dwarven 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. Yes.

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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 19th century.

There's a good summary of this history of like the debate about the origin of meteorites in the book Cosmic Horizons, edited by Steven Soder and Neil deGrasse Tyson. I think it was published in the year 2000. And the short version of the story is that there have long been reports from people, you know, seeing fireballs in the sky or hearing explosions, then finding rocks that they believed had fallen from above.

But as of the late 18th 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 came from somewhere on Earth. They couldn't have come from outer space. 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

just 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, uh, the planets, the stars, the comets. 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 Chladni, who lived 1756 to 1827, published a book in the year 1794 arguing that these reports were accurate and that rocks and pieces of iron actually do sometimes fall from the sky, in some cases creating fireballs and explosions as they are heated by friction traveling through the atmosphere.

Kalotny 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 dust or powder on a plate and then vibrating the plate by rubbing it with a violin bow. And so the powder would arrange itself into these patterns that were related to the sound waves produced.

uh clodney went about collecting eyewitness reports of fireballs and meteorite falls from the sky and he tried to evaluate them for credibility and see 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 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 1794, and it was initially met with skepticism by his peers, by European scientists. But many scientists updated their beliefs due to new emerging evidence. They sort of got lucky with 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 one in England, which included an eyewitness account of a farmer who claimed a black rock hit the earth only 30 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 1803, which was extensively documented by the French physicist Jean-Baptiste Biot, 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 the samples were unlike any rocks or metal ores known of on Earth. For example, the rocks contained what they called at the time globules. These are now known as chondrules. They're little round grains of

within the structure of the rock that begin as molten droplets of minerals in space and then accrete together within asteroids. Also, connecting to what we've already found, they discovered that iron meteorite fragments contained levels of nickel that had never been observed in Earth-based iron.

And then finally, another piece of evidence was the discovery of the first asteroid, the dwarf planet Ceres in 1801, which suggested that space between the planets and the comets was not empty. There were lots of rocky things floating around out there, and some of them might occasionally land on Earth.

And that was, in fact, what meteorites were. So it was more than 100 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 ancient Egyptians knew. So I was reading an article in the anthropology magazine Sapiens written by an Egyptologist named Victoria Almanza Villatoro. This is from 2023. And if Almanza Villatoro's argument is correct, the fact that meteorites come from space or from the sky was known to the ancient Egyptians. Right.

Just one cool example she mentions in the article is there's an interesting inscription in hieroglyphics that

Hmm.

Now, this article in Sapiens is based somewhat on Almanza Villatoro's academic publication in the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology from 2019 called The Cultural Indexicality of the N41 Sign for B... Oh, this has got some strange characters. BJ3, 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...

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 our main conclusions are about the religious and ceremonial functions of iron. Almanza Villatoro 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, I think often of a king or a ruler, but a ceremony over a body that seems to me 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 uh this this was not in the paper but i went looking for 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 tomb chapel of Rekmira, which involved dedicating a statue of the dead. And the text includes the following lines. There's a capital letter N here, which just refers to the name of the dead. So when you hear N, think of the name of the dead.

It goes,

with which he opened the mouth of Osiris, with the iron that came from Seth, the meskechu blade of iron, with which the mouths of gods are opened. May you open the mouth of En with it. Nice, and we get that connection back to Osiris, who we talked about previously on the show. This is interesting, too, because when I was researching Ta, who I talked about earlier, the Egyptian god associated with craftsmanship,

There was also mention in Pinch's work about the opening of the mouth ceremony. And elsewhere in the book, she talks about the Horus connection and so forth. But it seems like Todd 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, embodying it somehow. And like you said, perhaps turning on afterlife mode for the mummified body of an important person. 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. Mm hmm.

So Almanza Villatoro in this article gets into the fact that before the widespread or large-scale smelting of iron and ironworking within Egypt, there are still these iron artifacts that 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 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

was a phrase that literally can mean the metal of the 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 text, which are texts inscribed on the inner walls of the pyramids where the Egyptian kings and queens of the 5th to 8th dynasties of the Old Kingdom were buried.

This would cover a period of about of like 4100 to 4400 years ago or so. These texts included incantations that would be recited by priests to guide the dead rulers into into the afterlife. And the pyramid texts describe a really interesting cosmology, a really interesting picture of how the universe was shaped. And in her work, Almanza Villatoro 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 itself can fall to the earth. And these would be iron meteorites. Now, the author admits 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 and

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 interchangeable in the texts, which is why passages describe the dead sailing 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. Uh, because remember in many ancient cosmologies, people sort of believe the sky was in some sense full of water. And so maybe when it rains, that's water leaking out of the, the waters above, uh,

And so Almanza Villatoro writes that the goddess Nut 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 Nut's uterus. And so this sign used for iron is also associated with the word for uterus and the word for well, like a water well. Yeah.

And so she admits there might be legitimate reasons for doubting this interpretation that that these associations mean that the Egyptians knew that iron meteorites came from the sky. And one 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 like witness a meteorite falling, which itself is a fairly rare event, witness it falling and

and then have it be lucky enough that it lands very physically close that you can close enough that you 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 and

You know, that that would take a sort of like a lucky confluence of events that themselves might be fairly rare. But, you know, it happens often enough that there are records of other times and 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 and the waters above. Yeah, yeah. And again, perhaps throwing in the idea of the desert being an ideal place to spot them, the dark stone standing out against the lighter colored sand and so forth.

We may come back to meteorite hunting a little bit in subsequent episodes to explore this aspect of everything a bit more. Yeah, yeah. Oh, one more thing she notes that I think is interesting. 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. Excellent, excellent. Well,

In the next episode, I think we're going to get into some more examples. We're going to keep exploring the overall topic, but we'll also get into some other specific examples from other cultures. We'll sort of ask some of the same questions of Chinese traditions. You know, did they know that this iron came from above 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 cultures that I didn't even know had a tradition of using such substances. So it'll be fascinating to continue to explore this. No doubt. I'm excited. Yeah.

So in the meantime, if you have thoughts on this topic, 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 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 listener mail episodes publish 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.

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What did we decide a Discord was called? A server, perhaps? Well, you can email us and we'll send you the link so that you can go there. Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, JJ Poswave. 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 stufftoblowyourmind.com.

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