From the Vault: Meteoric Metal and Alien Iron, Part 3
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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This is Robert Lamb. We have another vault for you. This is going to be part three in our series from last year, originally published 5-16-2024, Meteoric Metal and Alien Iron. Part three. Let's jump right in. 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 am Joe McCormick, and we're back with part three of our series on human uses of iron from space. I think we had a little interlude there where on Tuesday of this week, we ran an unrelated interview. But today we're back to finish off the series with part three. Now, if you haven't heard the first two parts yet, you should probably go back, check those out first. But to do a quick recap, I'm Joe McCormick, and I'm Joe McCormick, and I'm Joe McCormick.

In part one, we focused largely on the iron dagger of Tutankhamun, a blade found wrapped up with the pharaoh Tutankhamun inside his coffin from before the time of large-scale smelting of iron in Egypt.

And we discussed chemical and mineral analysis showing that this dagger was almost certainly made out of iron that came not from Earth, but from a piece of iron meteorite that fell from space. And it turns out that a lot of iron artifacts like amulets, beads, tools, and trinkets are

A lot of these iron artifacts from before the various regional iron ages have this in common. They come from meteorites. So ancient peoples were taking alien metal that fell from the sky and shaping it to their uses.

In part two, we talked about a few more specific artifacts believed to be made from meteorite iron, such as the Shang Dynasty axes from ancient China and a meteorite iron sculpture known as the Iron Man or sometimes in the media as the Space Buddha.

which was at one point alleged to be a Tibetan depiction of a divine figure in Buddhism known as Vaishravana. But according to some experts in Buddhist art, was actually a 20th century European design amounting to a forgery or at least a crude imitation of Tibetan imagery. And then I ended up getting into some of the speculation about who could have actually made this sculpture, which is a somewhat wild story, if true. Big if true. Yeah.

We also talked about the history of knowledge that meteorites come from space. So it took scientists of the European Enlightenment until around the beginning of the 19th century to really agree on this. But there is some evidence that people in ancient China, in ancient Egypt and other cultures knew that this metal came from above. And some of the indications of this are linguistic, for example, in the fact that in the ancient Egyptian language,

There's a convention to refer to iron as iron of the sky or metal of the sky. And so today we're back to talk about more possible uses of meteorite iron in technology and artifacts from human history. And, you know, one thing that's interesting, this has sort of come up a little so far recently.

is that meteoric iron still retains a strong power, a sense of power and a mystical appeal, even after the spread of tools and artifacts made from earth-based iron. So even after iron as an element becomes common and mundane, you know, it's smelted out of iron ore from the earth and we use it to make all kinds of things, including, uh,

including steel products, there's still something undeniably appealing and even perhaps mystical about iron from the stars. That's right. And that's why in this next section, I want to get out of the Bronze Age and get into the post-Bronze Age Islamic world, where we see various mentions of what may be meteoric iron.

So a lot of this is going to concern swords, at least in the outset here. Swords have, of course, played a significant role in human history and take on various meanings across various cultures that use them, which is pretty much any culture with access to the prerequisite metals.

As we've discussed on Stuff to Blow Your Mind and The Artifact, the short form episodes we were on Wednesday before, we see sword-like weapons in cultures that did not have access to the prerequisite metalwork, though their functionality is ultimately perhaps more comparable to a club. Thinking here about particular examples of essentially wooden clubs that to the untrained eye might look like a sword, may even be...

You may even have bits of stone embedded in them, you know, given this sword-like appearance. So there is something like even when you cannot make swords because you don't have the prerequisite materials, there is something about the form and its extension of the human arm as a weapon that seems to lock up in various cultures.

At any rate, wherever the sword was known, the sword increasingly took on various literal, symbolic, metaphorical meanings. And this, of course, means that swords factor into various religious traditions in a number of ways. Like, for instance, in Christianity, Jesus mentions the sword as a metaphor for conflict.

And I believe the particular passage is widely interpreted to refer to social division rather than armed conflict. But like anything in a religious text, people will take it and apply whatever meaning they want to it. Yeah, there are a lot of ways you could read, I come not to bring peace, but a sword. Yeah. Now you'll find swords, even flaming swords and Buddhist iconography and Hinduism. And the sword, of course, also factors into Islam.

And I bring up these other religious examples in part because based on some of the sources I was looking at, it does seem that there is often a Western bias in interpreting sword iconography and references in Islam as more overtly tied to armed conflict than perhaps in other religions. This is not to say that the sword in Islamic traditions isn't, but as with other cultures, it doesn't always refer to armed conflict or violence. Could be literal, could be metaphorical. Exactly. Exactly.

So Islamic swords may stand for religious or political authority. They may stand for mystical knowledge and more in addition to military victory. But moving on to specific swords, there are a number of them of note from Islamic history. The Prophet Muhammad is held to have possessed nine swords during his life, and the most famous of which is the Dulfiqari.

or dual fakar. I may be pronouncing this incorrectly. If so, I apologize. But the name's meaning is largely uncertain, but may relate to concepts of splitting and is often depicted as a pronged split or double-bladed sword. You can look up images, various images of the sword in iconography, and depending on how it's presented, the blade may split near the tip

Or I've seen examples of the blade splitting close to the hilt. So I guess it kind of runs the gamut from like the highly symbolic to the, you know, believable and practical. And again, we're talking about largely about imagery here.

Actual symbolic swords have been produced, but the sword in question here, the dual fakar, is, I think, largely understood to be a mystical and or mythological item.

The story goes, however, that the prophet acquires the sword at the Battle of Badr in 624 and then ultimately passes the sword on to his son-in-law, Ali, the fourth caliph. Now, caliphs, by the way, if you're not familiar, these were the Muslim civil and religious rulers who succeeded Muhammad. So the sorting question here, the du'f al-qar,

is strongly associated with Ali. There are various legends about his military exploits with this mystical weapon and its ability to cut through his enemies, though it is also a symbol of political and spiritual authority. It is in many ways said to be the sword of swords, as Islamic blades were traditionally inscribed with the phrase, there is no sword but Dul Fakar, and there is no hero but Ali.

Okay, some superlatives. Right, right. And you can find examples of this. I was looking around and various museums inevitably have swords of Islamic origin that do mention the Dul Fuqar on them. So you can find examples of this, perhaps even in your own museum within your own region.

Now, some say that the actual sword in question here, among other relics, is currently in the possession of the Topkapi Palace Museum in Turkey.

But it also seems that in 12-verse Shiism, the sword is believed to be in heaven and or in the possession of Muhammad al-Mahdi, the imam believed to return at the end of time. So, again, there's this idea that, again, a highly mystical sword that is held in tradition to not even be perhaps on this earth anymore. Mm-hmm.

Now, I say all this to sort of get into the idea of Islamic swords, but this is not the sword that I wanted to talk about in connection to today's episode. I've seen no discussion that this sword or anything, any artifact that is connected to this sword containing meteoric iron, and I guess we should also clarify that any sword in the possession of beings not on this earth any longer cannot be analyzed.

However, we do see at least some mention of possible meteoric iron weapons in Islamic traditions. I'll get to a specific example in just a second. But, you know, we should remember that medieval Arab astronomy was extremely advanced.

Prior to the rise of Islam in the 7th century, pre-Islamic Arabs depended on empirical observations of constellations. And then with the rise of Islam, we see the emergence of this tradition of five daily prayers, prayers that need to be directed toward Mecca. And this creates a true incentive based on religion for better charting of time and location. Thus, there's a reason to focus more on the movements of the stars.

And this ends up helping to foster a more robust cultural understanding of astronomy, drawing upon other traditions in the ancient world and building out new knowledge. Now, on the other hand, I was reading a survey of Muslim materials on comets and meteors by David Cook. According to Cook, comets and meteors for a very long time in these traditions were not considered astronomical phenomena.

They were held to occur within the atmosphere, and therefore they were terrestrial. So they were largely omitted from astronomical works, while mentions would still be found in other forms of literature, especially when they were held as portents or lined up with important deaths or events, such as the death of the prophet in 632, as well as events in the lives of the third and fourth caliphs.

Now, in the past, I think this was when I was writing for How Stuff Works, and I was writing or applying some edits to an article that dealt with iron. And I remember reading that blades of possible meteoric iron had been associated with 7th century caliphs. And I look back, I tried to get into this because I really wanted to figure out where is this coming from? What specifically is this referring to? What are the sources?

And the initial source was a 1941 paper published in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland titled The Use of Meteoric Iron by T.A. Rickard. And at one point in the text, he discusses the possibility that Zeus's thunderbolts were a, quote, poetic expression for the use of meteoric iron.

And that later, I'm going to read a quote here from it. In later times, we read that Attila, Timur, Antar, and other devastating conquerors had swords from heaven.

so also the caliphs, whose swords were made of the same meteoric material as the Kaaba stone that lies in the holy sanctuary at Mecca. Averhose, an Arab philosopher of the 12th century, states that excellent swords were made from a meteor weighing 100 pounds that fell near Cordoba in Spain. Now, if

If you've listened to the show for a while, you know that we did an episode on the Kaaba Stone, the Black Stone of Mecca, a while back, probably a few years at this point. And one of the things that we did cover there that maybe wasn't as apparent to the author of this paper is that the origins of the Kaaba Stone are far from a settled matter. Yeah, I don't remember. It's been a while, so I don't remember exactly what we concluded there, but it seemed like...

There was still plenty of room for uncertainty there, though there were suggestions of reasons for thinking it may have been a stone created by an impact of some sort, whether it came from above or maybe whether it was...

created like one of those types of glasses created by impacts. Yeah, yeah. And I think ultimately it's just all observational because it's a sacred relic. It's not going to be scientifically analyzed, which is the case with many relics around the world.

In getting into this whole business about the swords, though, that's what I really wanted an answer to. And I've got to admit that I was able to find out precious little about Islamic swords alleged to have been forged from meteoric iron. Rickard here was citing British geologist Sir Lazarus Fletcher, who lived 1854 through 1921.

But rooting around an available text by this author, I didn't really find any answers to my questions either. I did consult a couple of sources about the history of metallurgy in the region. And it is key to note that, as we've already touched on, Islam arises after the end of the Bronze Age in the Middle East.

And the Islamic world had access to Damascus steel. So any meteoric weapons would be largely symbolic and or relics of the past. And they clearly had access to what is often held up as the best steel of the day. Right. Steel being a product of iron. So it would not be a question like we talked about with the King Tut example with this B.

being a, you know, a product from before the regional Iron Age, from before people, before there was large-scale smelting of iron in the area. There's plenty of smelting of iron and production of iron artifacts. These would just be iron from a different source in a place that was already rich with iron. Exactly, yeah. Now, interestingly enough, interestingly enough here, I don't know to what extent or any extent this ends up coloring these older, um,

Hmm.

I'm going to read the passage here. This is, of course, in translation. Indeed, we sent our messengers with clear proofs, and with them we sent down the scripture and the balance of justice so that people may administer justice. And we sent down iron with its great might, benefits for humanity and means for Allah to prove who is willing to stand up for him and his messengers without seeing him. Surely Allah is all-powerful, almighty.

So I imagine some interpretation is hinging there on the phrase we sent down iron with the idea of iron somehow coming from above iron.

Exactly, yeah. I was reading a paper titled Basic Concepts of Physics and the Perspective of the Quran by M. M. Qurashi. This was in a 1989 edition of Islamic Studies, and the author here writes that, quote, the implication of the words has become fully apparent only through historical investigation of the earliest use of meteoric iron.

So I could be wrong on this, and as always, I invite correction or clarity, but I believe some commentators argue that these lines in the Quran reference an historical understanding of iron meteorites, perhaps drawing on, again, as we've touched on, knowledge that already existed in the ancient world in different parts and to different degrees, that there was a connection between iron and meteorites, between iron and the sky.

Again, it makes perfect sense given everything we've discussed, but it also isn't necessarily guaranteed. Some also seem to interpret this verse as just stating that iron in the earth was a creation of Allah, and consideration of meteors doesn't seem to always serve as part of that conversation. You know, it was sent down—it's just a way of saying it came from God, which, you know—

Fair enough. You can say anything was sent down. I guess you could say a giraffe was sent down, but that doesn't mean it actually had a re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. Well, everything in this passage is said to be sent down, and the other cases of sent down here don't necessarily seem to imply a physical descent from space. Right. So, again, I invite correction or clarity on these points, especially from anyone who has Quranic knowledge and so forth. But

I did find it interesting that in this passage we see a possible reference to meteoric iron. And then we also have these other like more perhaps dubious mentions in Western writings about meteoric swords, meteoric iron swords that were used by the Caliphs. This episode is brought to you by Microsoft.

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All right. Well, I wanted to begin this next section by looking at how big chunks of meteoric iron arrive on Earth. Already, we've mentioned several examples of meteoroids that at some point entered Earth's atmosphere and fragmented or shattered in the air, separating into a series of smaller meteorite fragments, which can be found across an impact field.

For example, in the last episode, we talked about the Chinga meteorite, one piece of which was probably used to make the so-called Space Buddha sculpture that we talked about. And while the artistic origins of that sculpture are highly suspect, the physical origins are not really. It does seem to be agreed upon that this is a piece of iron meteorite.

So many fragments of the Chinga meteorite have been found in the region of Tuva, which is in southern Siberia, since the first recorded discovery by miners in the early 1900s. This scattering of iron meteorite chunks over a large area is the result of some original object coming apart into pieces somewhere in the atmosphere above the

roughly 10,000 to 20,000 years ago. Now, there are different ways for meteoroids to come

come apart or lose their structural integrity in the atmosphere. In some cases, they land roughly intact. In some cases, they split up into some number of smaller pieces from the original. And in some cases, they basically just explode or vaporize. And on the explosion end of the scale, the explosions before the meteoroids reach the ground, these explosions are referred to as airbursts.

In many such cases, the entire object or nearly the entire object is burned up or reduced to dust in the process. In the case of the relatively recent Chelyabinsk meteoroid, which exploded over Russia in February 2013,

An asteroid that was originally like 20 meters or 65 feet in diameter when it entered the Earth's atmosphere, it exploded a few tens of kilometers above the ground. For some reason, I've seen different estimates about the altitude. Some say 23 kilometers up, others say 30 kilometers up. But wherever it was, this explosion released a huge amount of energy expressed in the hundreds of kilotons of TNT, maybe like 400 or 500 kilotons of TNT,

The explosion way up there damaged thousands of buildings on the ground, blew out glass, and sent some 1,500 people to the hospital, though thankfully no deaths were reported. The footage of this, like the dashboard footage that was going around, is quite incredible. So if you haven't seen it, definitely seek it out. Absolutely. That is worth looking at. It is awe-inspiring. And this is a particularly big airburst in the modern era, not

Of course, the biggest that can happen, but very big in recent memory. Though I was reading, if the object had impacted the ground instead of exploding high up in the atmosphere, if it had hit the ground or exploded lower in the atmosphere, the damage could have been much, much worse. So in a way, the outcome was rather lucky.

But despite the fact that the Chelyabinsk meteoroid entered the atmosphere as an asteroid the size of a house, I've read estimates that well below 1% of its mass reached the ground in the form of solid meteorites. Again, this is something where I've seen different numbers on the estimate. I've read like 0.1% of its mass reached.

or like 0.05% of its mass, some very small percent of its mass actually reached the ground in solid chunks and the rest evaporated or was turned to dust as the object broke apart and burned up.

So this got me wondering, what actually causes a fast-moving meteoroid to just blow up or even vaporize like that? A key factor is speed. So the original object, which might be a chunk of asteroid or comet material at least a few meters in diameter, maybe up to tens of meters, typically enters Earth's atmosphere at great speed.

According to the American Meteor Society, meteors tend to enter the atmosphere going anywhere between 11 kilometers per second and 72 kilometers per second. And there's actually an interesting fact concerning this variability that you might not think about at first.

The speed with which a meteor enters Earth's atmosphere depends not only on the speed of the comet or the asteroid's orbit relative to the sun, so it has its own intrinsic speed as it's orbiting the sun, but it's also affected by the movement of

of the earth, which is simultaneously orbiting the sun at about 30 kilometers per second. And is also, uh, uh, though this is less important rotating at about, uh, 1,670 kilometers per hour.

Of course, speed is always, you know, it's relative to an observer. So even though we use language like the speed at which a meteor enters our atmosphere, that could give the false impression that our atmosphere is stationary and the meteor is moving. In reality, both are moving simultaneously.

And they're moving in their own directions. And so the speed of entry is determined by the relative velocity of both objects to each other. So it could be kind of trying to catch up with the part of the atmosphere it hits, or it could be like slamming into more kind of a head-on kind of collision with the part of the atmosphere it hits.

And then, of course, other things about other things about the way a meteor enters the atmosphere will determine will determine its ultimate fate, whether it burns up, what the resistance is. And so that would include things like the angle of entry.

Anyway, whatever the speed is at that incredible speed, the air directly in front of the meteor meteoroid, once it enters the atmosphere becomes greatly compressed. It's squeezing a lot of atmospheric gas in its path.

into a very small space very rapidly. So you can imagine it kind of like a pneumatic piston that is moving so fast it doesn't need a cylinder to squeeze the air in front of it. If you're traveling at dozens of kilometers per second, you're going to squeeze a lot of air into a thin layer at your bow before it has the chance to move out of the way. And as a result of being so violently compressed, this air gets extremely hot.

And then this layer of hot compressed gas flows around the sides of the object as it travels. This fast movement not only compresses the gas in front, but it also creates a relative vacuum in the space directly behind the meteoroid. And these forces put a lot of stress on the object, heating it up by thousands of degrees Celsius, melting or vaporizing parts of it, causing pieces of it to break off. It's just a huge amount of stress on a solid chunk of material.

These pieces that might be broken off of the object are in turn subjected to extreme forces of heat and pressure, and a sudden breakup of the main mass of the meteoroid can release just a lot of energy quite suddenly and resemble an explosion.

Also, in addition to all this, I came across a paper from 2018 adding another interesting mechanism, another piece of information to the puzzle here. So this paper was by Tabata and Malosh published in Meteoritics and Planetary Science in the year 2018. And the paper was called Air Penetration Enhances Fragmentation of Entering Meteoroids.

So this paper is discussing an attempt to model the physics of a fragmenting meteoroid with reference to the example of Chelyabinsk.

And the authors here argue that their model reveals a previously unrecognized but very important mechanism in how this breakup occurs, and that is the penetration of high-pressure air inside the body of the object through permeability of the material or through tiny cracks and pores in the rock or the metal. And as this air penetrates,

percolates into the solid body of the meteoroid it decreases its material strength it weakens it and makes it more likely to want to split apart and

One of the authors, Purdue University professor Jay Malosh, described the process in a press release saying, quote, there's a big gradient between the high pressure air in front of the meteor and the vacuum of air behind it. If the air can move through the passages in the meteorite, it can easily get inside and blow off pieces.

So airbursts are aided by this percolation, which every time I say that I do think of coffee as kind of kitchen first thinking. But this percolation of superheated compressed gas into the body of the meteoroid through these tiny holes and gaps in its structure. But not all meteoroids are equally vulnerable to this process.

Size and density help protect a meteoroid from fragmentation and vaporization. Iron meteoroids are not completely immune, but since they are denser on average than stony meteoroids, they are less likely to result in an airburst, and thus it is more likely that large, solid chunks reach the Earth's surface intact.

And so I would like to talk about one such meteorite, iron meteorite, that did reach the surface of the Earth in several very large pieces. And that is the Inanganik meteorite, also known as the Cape York meteorite, three large pieces of which are now on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. There's one that is enormous. You know, it's like sort of car sized. And even the other two that are smaller are very big.

So some thousands of years ago, we don't know exactly when, a meteoroid weighing possibly like 200 tons, about 180 metric tons, but we don't know for sure, hit a meteor.

Yeah.

After people first arrived in the area, again, we don't know for sure when this was, they found these large caches of solid iron and began using them to make iron tools through a process called cold forging, essentially using heavy objects such as stones to hammer pieces of the iron meteorite until they broke off and

And then you would hammer these pieces until they reached the shape you wanted, such as a knife blade or a harpoon tip. And this cold forging process was very energy intensive. It took a lot of human labor. These sources of meteorite iron became a vital mineral resource for the Inuit peoples of the region. It is telling that once more we're talking about a culture that would often be interacting with

with a landscape upon which little bits of meteorites

would potentially show up a lot easier and be easier to find. In this case, the snowscape. But in other cases, we've been talking about desert environments. Ice is actually a great surface for finding meteorites. This came up in that documentary that we watched by the Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer documentary where they're looking for meteorites on the surface of ice sheets by helicopter in Antarctica.

And it was a great place to look for them because otherwise, you know, you're not expecting to see rocks on the top of these ice sheets.

That is Fireball, Visitors from Darker Worlds from 2020. And yeah, we actually interviewed Herzog and Oppenheimer for the show. I believe it was in anticipation of this, right? Or was it about their volcano documentary? I'm blanking because I watched them both around the same time. At any rate, we talked to Werner Herzog and it was terrifying.

Though I do want to have a caveat there. I've seen some pictures, I believe, of how these particular iron meteorites were as they were originally in the places where the Inuit peoples found them. And from what I recall seeing, it seemed like they were not just like on top of bare ice sheets, but they were positioned among a landscape more like nestled in among rocks and earth.

Uh, so I think they still would have really stood out. They would have looked weird because they were iron meteorites, but, uh, but not just, uh, not so much like the things that, uh, the scientists were looking for in Antarctica where it's just like a black rock on otherwise unbroken white ice sheet. Right. Right. Anyway, the tools made out of these cold forged chunks of iron meteorite, uh, were the, the inner circulation. They were, uh, sourced from these locations, uh,

And then eventually traded with the communities surrounding the Inuit peoples of northern northwestern Greenland. Eventually, they made it even farther. There's some evidence that some iron tools made out of pieces of this meteorite were traded with Norse Vikings sometime before the in the 11th century or before.

But by the 16 and 1700s, explorers from Europe started to make repeated contact with various Inuit peoples, including the Inuit of the far north. And the Inuit are a group of Inuit people, also known sometimes as the polar Inuit. They speak a language called Inuktan, and their homeland is in northwestern Greenland.

These European and U.S. explorers, such as the Scottish naval officer John Ross, recorded that in speaking to these people, they were told about some kind of mountain of iron that the Inuit were using to make their iron tools. But for a long time, they never saw the explorers never saw these iron sources for themselves.

This was until the expeditions led by the U S explorer, Robert Peary beginning around 1894. Uh, Peary is mainly known for trying to reach the North pole. Uh, there's some dispute about whether Peary ever actually did make it to the geographic North pole. He certainly claimed he did in April, 1909, but it's difficult to verify since the ice would have been over water and is constantly moving. So the marker he placed in the ice can't confirm it. Uh,

Also, some later analysis of the records of the expedition cast doubt on the physical plausibility of their journey. And also, if Piri did make it to the geographic North Pole, there's an account from Matthew Henson, an African-American explorer who lived from 1866 to 1955 and served on multiple expeditions with Piri, indicating that he was actually the one who made it there first if they did make it. So a lot of questions remain about that.

But anyway, after living among the Inuit and learning from them and trading with them, Piri eventually removed three large chunks of iron meteorite from Inuit lands, the largest of which is known as Anahito or the tent. And this one is more than 30 metric tons. And it required the construction of a rail system just to get it to his ship in order to be transported to New York.

But there were also two other smaller but still quite sizable iron masses known as the woman and the dog later. And Piri's plan was to sell these objects in order to finance his future expeditions to the Arctic. And they remain on display today at the American Museum of Natural History.

Now, in addition to taking away these meteorites that were so important to the Inuit, not just practically as tools, more on that in a minute, there is also an incredibly tragic story of how Peary took away six Inuit people and delivered them back to the American Museum as well under the false pretense that they would soon be sent back home with many gifts and supplies.

But in crowded New York, they were quickly exposed to unfamiliar pathogens, and most of them died of respiratory diseases. So in the end, that story is very sad. I think one man from the group was able to return to Greenland.

And there was a boy among the group named Minnick who did grow up in the United States for some time. And then I believe it sometime later tried to return to Greenland and then also at some point came back to the United States. But he passed away in the 1918 flu pandemic. This episode is brought to you by Microsoft.

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But regarding the Inuit beliefs about these meteorites that had provided them with iron tools for so many hundreds of years, I wanted to mention a really interesting episode of another podcast that I came across while researching this subject. So this other podcast is called Endless Thread, and it's put out by Boston's public radio station, WBUR. I previously wasn't familiar with it, but this one episode I listened to was really great. And this podcast

podcast generally discusses uses of meteorite among the Inuit people. But my favorite thing about it is that it includes interview material with an Inuit shaman named Hivshu. And it's definitely worth checking out that episode in full. I think the main title before a colon and subtitle is A Meteorite in Greenland. But I wanted to mention one interesting and important thing that sort of comes up in it.

So Hivshu is from a place in northwestern Greenland called Hura Palook, where the Inuit people have this long relationship with meteorite fragments. And Hivshu says that in their language, these are known as the excrement of the stars. That sounds like an entirely different take on Hivshu.

But it doesn't have the connotations you might bring to it, thinking of it as excrement, because these objects are quite sacred, in fact. I've read in other contexts that a justification given for Piri's removal of the iron meteorites from Inuit lands is that they were used as a means of getting the iron meteorites out of the land.

Yeah.

Now, I think there are even if they were even if these meteorites were only significant for practical uses as a source of iron, I think there would be reasons for doubting that that way of thinking, that justification. But in this interview, Hipschew makes clear that these meteorites have significance, but

Beyond simply being utilitarian sources of metal, though they were that as well, their significance was sacred. And he mentions that cutting off a piece of metal from the source involves a ritual. There is a ritual to that sort of giving the people access to the metal from the sacred object.

And the tools made from it are not simply viewed as tools. He calls them partners because in a way he says everything in their view of the world is life. Everything is infused with life. So a tool, a tool made from this meteorite is not just simply a dead object to get some use out of. It is a partner in your work. So,

So anyway, if you want to check out that other podcast episode, again, the show is called Endless Thread. The title of the episode is a meteorite in Greenland. But to continue on the subject, I was reading around and I found other accounts of Inuit people explaining that they view these meteorites as having a sacred power.

And that, in fact, religious significance and material utility are not mutually exclusive in their view. So just one example I came across was a paper published

Published in the journal Meteoritics by Marden et al. called Contemporary Inuit Traditional Beliefs Concerning Meteorites. This is from the year 1992, and it records what was said about meteorites by Inuit elders in the High Canadian Arctic in 1988. So a few details of what the authors here were told.

They were told that Inuit people have long come across rocks in the landscape that they interpret as being not natural, sort of not the same as everything else around them.

And in some cases, these are meteorites and meteorite pieces that are discovered or possessed by a person can give people special powers in some cases or have some kind of special link to the fate of the person who owns them. They mentioned that these iron meteorites have been sources of metal for the fashioning of effective tools and weapons. But contrary to what might be a common Western assumption, meteorites

This does not mean that they are not viewed as sacred or spiritual objects. Quote, "...the one evident thing that became clear to the author is that the Inuit distinctly believe that these meteorites are religious objects of the highest order, and it brings into question the current academic practice of sending meteorites south to research institutes."

Any seeming conflict with the traditional use of meteoric iron is more apparent than real, the animals, the hunt, the act of survival all being bound up in the mystic patterns of animistic belief.

So what I take from this is it's sort of pushing back against an assumption that many Westerners might have that, oh, if people are just using this metal to make tools that they use for everyday chores, you know, for hunting and other things that must be done to survive. And, you know, and maybe if you compensate them by trading with them some other objects that are useful for survival, then there's nothing wrong with taking this stuff away.

And you might not feel the same way about an artifact that is that has religious significance, but maybe was crafted by humans and kept in a sacred special place and has no role in the ongoing work of everyday life.

But I think they're saying that's wrong. Even though this is used to make materials that are used in regular work, it still is also sacred. And that kind of raises questions for me about like, why would we have the contrary assumption to begin with? Why would we naturally assume that if a material is broken off of a mother load and hammered into blades or harpoon tips or other tools used for everyday survival, that material is not sacred or is not a religious object?

Yeah.

Yeah, there's a lot to unwrap there, because on one hand, you could see this kind of viewpoint being rooted in clear examples of highly ornate objects that were not intended for actual functional use, such as some sort of a ritualistic weapon that was clearly not intended for use on the battlefield, or some sort of ritualistic item that essentially has the role of a scepter, where it becomes a symbol of power, but it is somewhat divorced from reality.

practical applications that it may have had in its sort of

artifact-based history. Like, for instance, the traditional scepters in Chinese tradition, I've seen some discussion that they may have in origin been backscratchers. That's one theory. So it's like, okay, you have a practical item that then ultimately becomes a thing that is completely divorced from that tradition. And so if you're looking for those kinds of clear examples, like, okay, well, this is clearly...

a sacred item because it doesn't look like it could be used every day. So you have that going on. But then, yeah, I don't know. It is weird to think about this idea of thinking that everyday items, everyday things cannot be held up as sacred because I think, for one thing, you can see various, plenty of examples from history where things people encountered every day still took on sacred meaning.

One example that comes to mind is the horse. Like the horse is, you know, during times of its domestication, to be clear here, you know, it takes on sacred connotations, mystical connotations, like the horse, the skull of the horse, right?

is often held up in different societies as having some sort of a peculiar meaning or aura to it. And yet the horse was every day. The horse was something that was just part of your daily life and you depended upon. And then on the other end of things, there's just our personal experience. Like a beloved tool, we may not really be in the mindset of thinking about things in our immediate vicinity as being

you know mystical or magical or sacred because maybe we just don't apply that mindset to our immediate world but um i don't think that the way

we consider our tools and consider our knickknacks are completely divorced from that thinking either. I mean, just think about like whatever, if you do engage in some sort of a craft or a handiwork, like do you have a beloved tool? And how much would you have to lean into the idea of it being important to get to the level of it being sacred? Or the source of the material from which it is made being sacred. Yeah. Yeah.

This also comes back to, it reminds me, we were talking earlier about excrement, the idea of meteoric iron as being the excrement of the sky or so forth. This brings me back to something that came up in our episodes on dust about how there's sort of like a modern understanding of excrement. You know, it's just pure waste, right? But for people that were actually engaged in like working the land and all, like there would have been more of an understanding that this is not like a

a valueless byproduct. This is something that then can be used to grow something new. You know, it can be used as a fertilizer. There are various traditions where, of course, it's also used typically, you know, I think we're dealing with animal excrement in these cases, but it can be used also as fuel for fire. So you don't have to, like, lean far in that direction to see this as something that can be, that new life can be breathed into, you know? Mm-hmm.

But again, just coming back to the idea of sacred items in everyday life, I mean, yeah, I think most of us can easily admit that we very easily imbue physical items with meaning. I mean, it becomes a problem for people. So it's, they're not necessarily, you know, hoarders are not making everything sacred, I guess, necessarily. But, you know, I don't, I don't think it's, you

you know, beyond the realm of our understanding that a tool, especially when you depend upon, could, you know, take on a sacred quality. Mm-hmm.

Now, as we begin to close out these episodes, I guess we're closing out these episodes on iron. I don't know. Do you think you have another one in you, Joe? Well, there certainly are plenty more examples we could talk about, but I feel like maybe we're ready to move on for our purposes. But we could come back to it, I guess. Yeah, yeah. Probably will come up again. Yeah, yeah. There are a lot of examples out there. I would love to hear from listeners about it. I mean, for instance, we didn't touch on much in the way of modern meteoric weapons that have been produced today.

uh, very much with the understanding that these are meteors, uh, these meteorites and, um, and this, uh, this is metal from the sky. And, uh, you see various examples of this. Uh, the, the late Terry Pratchett, for example, uh, had a meteoric, uh, blade, uh, forged for himself using, I believe, uh, bits of meteorite that he himself had collected. Um, this was for when he was knighted, uh,

Oh, boy. Yeah, he wanted to make sure he had the right sword for it. Really making it an occasion. Yeah, yeah. Make a feast of it. There are also various other blades. I was reading about a Japanese blade. This is a Japanese samurai sword forged by modern-day swordsmith Yoshindo Yoshiwara. It is called the Tintetsuto, or the Sword of Heavenly Iron.

And this particular sword, which you can see is on display, it uses iron from the Gibeon meteorite that fell in Namibia during prehistoric times. You can look up images of it. It looks pretty cool. And I also read that fragments of this meteorite were also traditionally used by the Nama people of Namibia for many centuries in tools and in weapons.

And you'll find various meteoric swords in fiction. I don't believe this is in the core books. This may be in the additional matter, but apparently a couple of these blades show up in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.

And also on Avatar The Last Airbender, I'd totally forgotten about this, but a meteoric sword does come into play on that show as well. Those are just a couple of the fictional examples, but I'm sure there are plenty more. So yes, we would love to hear from you out there. Ride in with your favorite examples of fanfics.

fictional meteoric weapons, as well as various examples or potential examples with that huge caveat, you know, that we get into in the first episode regarding actual weapons that may include iron of meteoric origin. Please do. We're going to get a lot of the fictional ones, Rob. I think this is a rich vein to exploit here. Yeah, let's have it.

All right. We're going to go ahead and close out the show here. But hey, again, we'd love to hear from everyone out there. And if you would like to help us out, if you want to support the show, I tell you, one of the best things you can do is make sure that you are subscribed to the show. So wherever you get your podcasts, be it Apple, various other places.

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There are places where science and mystery collide, and Skinwalker Ranch might be the most compelling. In the new season of The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch on the History Channel, a team of scientists and engineers uncovers a mysterious material buried inside the mesa, one that doesn't occur naturally. This isn't just legend. It's real data, physical evidence that challenges everything we know about geology, physics, and maybe even reality itself.

How deep does the truth go? Find out on The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch. New episode Tuesday at 8, 7 central. Only on the History Channel. This is an iHeart Podcast.