Meteoric Metal and Alien Iron, Part 1

Published May 7, 2024, 7:51 PM

Before the dawn of the iron age, ancient humans had but one source of workable iron for their artifacts and weapons: meteorites. In this very-metal episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss various examples of meteoric metal artifacts, including several precious sky-weapons of antiquity. 

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.

Hey you 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, 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 thirty three hundred to twelve hundred BCE, 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 going to be looking at in this episode, I just wanted to share a couple of quotes to perhaps help put this time frame 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 appliable 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 bronzewear. 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, it looks as if the earliest kings or feudal princes recognized bronze metallurgy to be the basis of feudal power over the Neolithic peasantry because of the superior arms which it rendered possible, and therefore they appropriated that the technique of metalworking. So what I like about these two quotes is I think they helped 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 you know 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 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, I mean, 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 tutin Common. So the tomb of the eighteenth dynasty Egyptian pharaoh tutin Common was uncovered by the British archaeologist Howard Carter and his team in nineteen twenty two. Tutin Common reigned from thirteen sixty one to thirteen fifty two BCE, becoming king around the age of nine or so, unruling until his early death around the age of eighteen. Tutin Common is thought to have been a son of the pharaoh Acinaten, 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 Akinatin, but it's not known for sure. Acinatein his likely father, was notable for trying to replace the traditional polytheistic religion of Egypt with a It's debatable how to characterize this, but a monotheistic or monoltruistic or perhaps henotheistic whatever you call it, focus on single God, an emphasis of one god above all the others from the Egyptian pantheon, and that is the solar deity Atan, 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 Achinatin's death, and one of Tutonkommon's main accomplishments as pharaoh seems to have been the restoration of the old polytheistic cults.

Yeah, the rejection of new coke and the re acceptance of old coke.

Play in the hits getting the old gang together. So Tutancommon's tomb was considered a very special discovery in the twentieth 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 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 that Tuten comments Tune 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 Tuton Common's tomb was relatively well preserved because the entrance got covered up by stuff and people pretty quickly forgot where it was. And so when this tomb was rediscovered in the twentieth 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 twenty sixth, nineteen twenty two, 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 flick, 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 Carnivon said to me, can you see anything? I replied to him, yes, it is wonderful. I then, with precaution, made the whole 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 and ornamental caskets, flo alabaster vases, some beautifully executed of lotus and papyrus, device strange black shrines with a gilded monster snake appearing from within, 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 lodiform 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 mannikin 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 Touton common 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. 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 nineteen twenty five. This was buried right along with the pharaoh's body. One of these artifacts. It was a beautiful dagger. In fact, there were two daggers buried with tooton common, 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, this sort of like with different sides of theagger facing and then different types of illumination. But the iron dagger is a little over a foot long, 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.

So the knife has a handle made out of gold with a crystal knob on the end, sort of 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 Lilly's, 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 middle that to me almost look like lunar maria. They're these sort of you know, strange, beautiful little black depressions that have almost geographical looking edges.

Yeah.

Yeah, So the stagger made of iron was instantly quite interesting to experts because it was made of iron. Tutin Common 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 Totincman'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 extracted from iron ore that we mine out of the ground, and then we extract in pure metallic form from its ore form in extremely hot furnaces. And while there were plenty of iron ore deposits in the deserts of Egypt, there was not a widespread industry that was able to separate pure metallic iron from its ore in the region until several hundred years later. I 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 that there's sort of a more complicated answer and a 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, 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 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 law some times 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 Egyptian to use 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 that even if you are implying things that are not true as well. I've even seen alien weapons mentioned before.

Now, 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 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 find what fell from the sky. We've talked about the phenomena of star jelly before. This is where someone sees a shooting star or thinks the meteorite has fallen in their general vicinity, and they go out into the woods and they start poking around. Do 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 it 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 and 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 five or six percent of meteorite falls. 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 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, like cool 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? Iron meteorites are thought to probably be the remaining cores of asteroids that at some point asteroids or parts of former planetesimals that at some point melted and then re solidified. They're mostly made of iron, Like I said, they have some nickel content, as well as other traces of minerals and metals, some cobalt content, some phosphorus, some sulfur, and so forth. 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, chemosite and taanite 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 Vidminstottin 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 that's just what these crystals do. And in fact, the way this specifically look seems to be a result of creating a two dimensional cross sectional representation 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 and D player, you just picture a D eight die.

Yeah, yeah, that's sematar damage.

So the octahedral structure is created by the interaction of these two different minerals chemisite and tanite, 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 vidmin Stottin pattern. 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, 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. One is by Daniellocomelli at All that was published in the journal Metiorritics and Planetary Science in the year twenty sixteen, and it's called the Meteoritic Origin of Toutencommon's iron dagger blade. Now, one thing that is an obstacle when you 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 floor to give off light energy as they're you know, 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 that 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 ten point eight percent by weight nickel and zero point five to eight percent by weight cobalt, and these numbers are are not to be found in earth based iron generally. Studies have found that earth based iron extracted from before like the eighteen hundreds, tends to always have less than four percent nickel by weight.

Yeah, yeah, I was reading some sources about this as well, and yeah, 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 some other things as well.

Yeah, there was one paper I was looking at Albert Jambond from twenty seventeen Bronze age iron meteoritic or not. And this is the additional subheading subtitle a chemical strategy. And in this one they pointed out like 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 like basically a weathering away of some of the nickel content at least on the testable portions of an artifact.

But from what I could tell, most researchers are pretty well convinced by this and other recent studies. There's another one I'm gonna mention in a second saying that this probably really is meteorite. So speaking to the BBC, the lead author, Daniella Coomelli, who by the way, is that she's an experimental physic assist 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, and in fact, the authors of this study from twenty sixteen even matched the composition of the blade of Tutencommon's dagger to that of a known meteorite in the region, one which landed about two hundred and forty 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 besitting of a rare material. There's one little bit I want to side here. This is from the Brian M. Fagan book The Seventy Great Inventions of the Ancient World. Paul T. Kratoc is the main writer on a chapter in that that deals with with iron and other metals, and Kratak mentions the dagger of Tutankammon, 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 there are other examples of meteoric iron being used in very regal, very ornamental pieces like this and this one, this particular one is referred to in a letter. This is from twelve to fifty BCE. We have a letter from the Hittite ruler Tatusilius the third to the king of Assyria, and in this letter he apologizes for not being able to supply iron and instead hopes that the guilt to a single accompanying iron blade will be acceptable Socratic rights quote. So in twelve fifty BC, a single iron blade from the one available source of iron was an appropriate placiatory 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 more evidence that like, these things were so highly valued. These are the kind of things that kings gave to each other, you know, these are the kind of things that kings were buried with. But Kradack also points out that mere centuries later, iron making 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, I guess 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 the 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, 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 reference in some other sources that I'll probably come back to later on that certainly in the Chinese examples. You know, the Chinese were the ancient Chinese were aware of meteorites, that 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 tools and so forth, unlike even other precious metals and other stones and so forth that were used. But then there was also 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 meteor origin of the iron in the blade. So the other study I wanted to point out was from twenty twenty two. This is in the journal I think, same journal, Yeah, same journal, Metiaritics and Planetary Science. And this is by Takafumi Matsui at All and it's called the Manufacture and Origin of the toot And Common Metiorritic 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 author's right quote. Here we report non destructive two dimensional chemical analysis of the tutencommon 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 millimeters, suggesting a vidmin stotton pattern. Remember that, yeah, ah, yeah, So the intermediate nickel content with the presence of the vidmin stotton pattern implies the source meteorite of the dagger blade to be octahedrite. So again, that's the octahedron the d eight die. Furthermore, they say that the quote randomly distributed sulfur rich black spots are likely remnants of troylite 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 troylite 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 with iron and the egg yolk and make iron sulfide. So yeah, that's that's what the gross green stuff is. It's not gonna hurts you. You can still eat it.

You're not a fan of green eggs.

Well, no, I'm fine with all full green eggs. I don't love the green 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 need it with a goat and so forth.

I need anything with a goat. You know. 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 vidmuns dot and 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 nine hundred and fifty 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 used some material analysis to kind of back it up. So the authors here argued that this stagger was quite possibly a gift given to Tutankhommon's likely grandfather. I'm Innhotep the third from the Kingdom of Mitani in Anatolia. Because there is a tablet mentioning such a gift among Egyptian records. There's a tablet that says, you know, they're sending a gift to I'm Inhotep the third 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 jim stones to the gold hilt, and that lime plaster glue is characteristic of Mittani 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 and Egyptian mythology, and essentially we should probably point out, yeah, that the Egyptian god associated with metal working is the god Taw, 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 have 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 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 he's associated with dwarves, perhaps to the fact that dwarves were often employed in gym working. And this on its own is a pretty fast any topic, the role of dwarfs 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 we're 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 dwarf in form of one sort or another. And Ta also would later be equated with Hephaestus by the Greeks, though of course Ephaestus was not beautiful of face, I think in most traditions.

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 nineteenth century. There's a good summary of this history of the debate about the origin of meteorites in the book Cosmic Horizons, edited by Steven Soder and Neil de Gras Tyson. I think it was published in the year two thousand and The short version of the story is that there have long been reports from people seeing fireballs in the sky or hearing explosions, then finding rocks that they believed had fallen from above. But as of the late eighteenth 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 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, 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 Kladney, who lived seventeen fifty six to eighteen twenty seven, published a book in the year seventeen ninety four 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. Claudney 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 wave 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 range itself into these patterns that were related to the sound waves produced. Claudney 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 melt to their outer shells, and so he looked into it He published this book in seventeen ninety four, 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 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 thirty 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 eighteen oh three, which was extensively documented by the French physicist Jean Baptiste bo which included reports of a fireball as well as an elliptical impact area that had many weird stones within it. These reports were supplemented by chemical and mineral analysis of some of these meteorite samples, and it turned out that these 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, their little round grains within the structure of the rock that begin as molten droplets of minerals in space, and then a crete 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 series in eighteen oh one, 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 one hundred 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 who named Victoria almansa Villatorro. This is from twenty twenty three and if Almansa Villatoro's argument is correct, the fact that meteorites come from space or from the sky was known to the ancient Egyptians. Just one cool example she mentions in the article is there's an interesting inscription in hieroglyphics inside the pyramid of Unus at Sakara. Unus was the last pharaoh of the Fifth dynasty during Egypt's Old Kingdom, and he ruled in the middle of the twenty fourth century BCE, so like forty four hundred years ago, and the sentence from the pyramid text reads, Eunice the king seizes the sky and splits its iron. Now, this article in Sapiens is based somewhat on almans Of Villatorro's academic publication in the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology from twenty nineteen called the Cultural Indexicality of the N forty one sign for beat this. Oh, this's got some strange characters. BJ three 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 details. 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 remain conclusions or about the religious and ceremonial functions of iron Almansa. Villaturro 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 be sort of activated the powers of life beyond death. It's sort of like turning on after life 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 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 rek Mira, which involved like dedicating a statue of the dead, and the text includes the following lines. There's a letter, a capital letter in here which just refers to the name of the dead. So when you hear in, you think of the name of the dead. It goes, I have balanced your mouth and bones for you.

In.

I have opened your mouth for you.

In.

I open your mouth for you with the new uplade. I have opened your mouth for you with the new uplade. The mesca hetch you blade of iron that opens the mouths of gods. Horace is the opener of the mouth of N. Horace. Horace has opened the mouth of N. Horace has opened the mouth of N with that which he opened the mouth of his father, with which he opened the mouth of Osiris, with the iron that came from Seth. The mesketch you blade of iron with which the mouths of gods are opened. May you open the mouth of N with it?

Nice And we get that connection back to Osyrus, who we talked about previously on the show. This is interesting too, because then when I was researching Taw, 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's 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 after life 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. So all months of Villatorro in this article gets into the fact that before the widespread or large scale smelting of iron and iron working 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 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 pyramid text which are texts inscribed on the inner walls of the pyramids where the Egyptian kings and queens of the fifth to eighth dynasties of the Old Kingdom were buried. This would cover a period of forty one hundred forty four hundred years ago or so. These texts included incantations that would be recited by priests to guide the dead rulers into the afterlife. And the pyramid texts describe a really interesting cosmology, really interesting picture of how the universe was shaped. And in her work, Almans of Villatro 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. 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 sling 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, 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 waters above. And so Almans of Vulatora writes that the goddess Newt 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 nuts Uterus, and so this sign used for iron is also associated with the word for uterus and the word for well, like water well. And so she admits there might be legitimate reasons for doubting this interpretation 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 the like witness a meteorite falling, which itself is a fairly rare event, witness it falling, 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. You know, 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 in 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 in the dark stone standing out against of a lighter colored sand, and so forth. 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 knows 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 gonna we're going to keep exploring the overall topic, but we'll also get into some other specific examples from other cultures. Well, we'll sort of ask some of the same questions of Chinese traditions. You know, did they know that 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 to cultures that that I didn't even know how to tradition of using such substances. So it'll be 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 you 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 we're in 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 published 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. You can follow us wherever you get your podcasts. Leave a nice review, maybe some sprinkling of stars if you want to be generous and support the show, and a if you want to follow us on social media, We're available in a number of places. Look us up on Instagram, Look us up on Facebook. There's a Facebook group, the Stuff to Blow Your Mind discussion module, where you can interact with other fans. There's also a discord page or what did we decided to discord us 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 Posway. 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 stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

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