Iron in Egyptian relics came from space

[G_j]

http://www.nature.com/news/iron-in-egyptian-relics-came-from-space-1.13091

Iron in Egyptian relics came from space
Meteorite impacts thousands of years ago may have helped to inspire ancient religion.

Jo Marchant
29 May 2013

The 5,000-year-old iron bead might not look like much, but it hides a spectacular past: researchers have found that an ancient Egyptian trinket is made from a meteorite.

The result, published on 20 May in Meteoritics & Planetary Science1, explains how ancient Egyptians obtained iron millennia before the earliest evidence of iron smelting in the region, solving an enduring mystery. It also hints that they regarded meteorites highly as they began to develop their religion.

“The sky was very important to the ancient Egyptians,” says Joyce Tyldesley, an Egyptologist at the University of Manchester, UK, and a co-author of the paper. “Something that falls from the sky is going to be considered as a gift from the gods.”

The tube-shaped bead is one of nine found in 1911 in a cemetery at Gerzeh, around 70 kilometres south of Cairo. The cache dates from about 3,300 bc, making the beads the oldest known iron artefacts from Egypt.

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[leftyohiolib]

1. all iron came from space

[snooper2]

2. LOL

[Ikonoklast]

4. But from whence does Irony come?

Find that in your Philosophy, thou artless knave!

[sofa king]

3. The Smithsonian has a lot of meteorite artifacts.

Very few of them have ever been displayed for long. Here's one of them:

http://wamu.org/programs/metro_connection/12/09/07/smithsonian_displays_mysterious_dagger_from_the_stars

The Freer's basement holds many, many times the number of artifacts that are on display, or which have ever been displayed, including a large array of meteorite tools first identified in the '70s.

Native North Americans were quite cagey about disclosing the location of several "Iron Mountains" known to them in Greenland--and with good reason, for more or less as soon as Robert Peary was led to them nearly three-quarters of a century after Europeans first heard of them, Peary arranged to steal them and bagged a huge profit from it.