King Tut owned a dagger that was out of this world—literally. Researchers have recently published a study in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science that supports what has long been suspected: The ancient Egyptians were using meteoritic iron well before the spread of iron smelting technology.
In 1925, famed archaeologist Howard Carter—who three years earlier had discovered King Tutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings—found in the pharaoh’s mummy wrapping two daggers: one with a blade of gold and one with a blade of iron. The iron-bladed dagger, finely made with a gold handle and pommel of rock crystal, has long been the subject of debate, as it predates the pervasiveness of iron smelting technology (the extraction of iron from its ore) in the Mediterranean by several centuries. King Tut—whose father Akhenaten established during his reign worship of a single god, the sun-disk Aten—ruled c. 1332–1323 B.C.E. in the 18th Dynasty of ancient Egypt.
Iron objects dating to the Bronze Age have been found sporadically throughout the Mediterranean, the oldest of which are nine small beads that were excavated from a 3200 B.C.E. tomb in Gerzeh, Egypt. While iron was sometimes obtained at this time as a byproduct of copper and bronze smelting, scholars assumed that during the Bronze Age, objects manufactured in ironworking were made from meteoritic iron.
