Ancient Egyptians wore jewellery made from meteorites

Ancient Egyptians wore jewellery made from meteorites

The strings of iron beads were excavated in 1911 at the Gerzeh cemetery, a burial site approximately 70km south of Cairo. Dating from 3350 to 3600 BC, thousands of years before Egypt’s Iron Age, the bead analyzed was originally assumed to be from a meteorite owing to its composition of nickel-rich iron. The discovered 5,000 year old ancient Egyptian artifact made from a meteorite is an important find as it unlocked the mystery surrounding the presence of iron among the ancient Egyptians. ‘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 on the discovery. ‘Something that falls from the sky is going to be considered as a gift from the gods.’

Microscopy showed that the nickel content of this original metal was high — as much as 30% — suggesting that it did indeed come from a meteorite. Backing up this result, the team observed that the metal had a distinctive crystalline structure called a Widmanstatten pattern.

This structure is found only in iron meteorites that cooled extremely slowly inside their parent asteroids as the Solar System was forming. Heaven-sent iron bead poses exciting questions about the way the cosmos influenced their religion.

Ancient Egyptians wore jewellery made from meteorites

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