BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

Extraterrestrial Elements in Egyptian Equipment

Bible and archaeology news

Where did Egyptians get the iron found in beads in a fourth-millennium-B.C.E. cache at the Gerzeh cemetery? Scholars have long been mystified by the discovery, which predates evidence of iron smelting in the region by thousands of years. Archaeologists have searched the dirt for evidence of early (and possibly accidental) smelting sites, but a new study in Meteoritics & Planetary Science suggests that they should have been looking up, rather than down, for answers.

A research team led by Open University meteorite scientist Diane Johnson examined the nickel content and crystalline structure of one of the beads to confirm that the iron came from a meteorite. The team was able to reconstruct the way the ancient Egyptians worked the material: “Successive virtual CT slices revealed bending points and a joining edge, suggesting production by beating flat a fragment of iron, followed by bending to produce the tube.”

While there is no confirmed evidence of iron smelting in the region before Greco-Roman times, the presence of iron objects in royal tombs reveals that they were a symbol of status in earlier periods of Egyptian history. The Egyptians themselves appear to have been aware of the otherworldly source of their iron. The authors of the study write that “from the late 18th Dynasty, approximately 1300 B.C.E., the term biA-n-pt starts to be used, which literally reads iron from the sky and from this point onwards … the term becoming synonymous with metallic iron in general.”

Read the study “Analysis of a prehistoric Egyptian iron bead with implications for the use and perception of meteorite iron in ancient Egypt” by Diane Johnson, Joyce Tyldesley, Tristan Lowe, Philip J. Withers and Monica M. Grady as it appears in Meteoritics & Planetary Science.

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In the free eBook Ancient Israel in Egypt and the Exodus, top scholars discuss the historical Israelites in Egypt and archaeological evidence for and against the historicity of the Exodus.

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Related reading in Bible History Daily:

King Tut’s Dagger Made of Extraterrestrial Material

Epilepsy, Tutankhamun and Monotheism

Where is Queen Nefertiti’s Tomb?

Has Queen Nefertiti’s Tomb Been Located?

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