How spectacular is this? King Tut was buried with a dagger made of gold, and one made of iron from a meteorite. I must admit, a gold dagger would be really darn nice, and impressive, but the nerd in me is just screaming for the extraterrestrial iron dagger one. But to be completely fair, it has only recently been discovered as being made from extraterrestrial material. In fact, for decades Egyptologists were a little perplexed as to how King Tut came by a dagger made of iron. Why? Let’s explain.
As most of us know, the ancient Egyptians buried their pharaohs with all kinds of worldly items. This included many personal artifacts, gold, jewelry and even servants (talk about working you to death). But it was the daggers that were buried with king Tut that have generated the most hype and speculation. Sure, gold is a mineral that everyone knows, but iron where there shouldn’t be iron. That’s a mystery fit for the X-Files.
1300 years ago, around the time that the boy king departed this realm, the ancient Egyptians were not believed to have possessed the ability to forge iron. This is the majority belief held by archaeologists and historians. The only civilization at that time who had the ability were the Hittite civilization. But that doesn’t completely rule out the chances of the Egyptians getting their hands on iron. It was known that the two ancient civilizations had regular contact. This contact was more than likely the way that the dagger ended up in Egypt.
But that was only part of the puzzle. After conducting extensive laboratory analysis on the dagger, it was found to contain high concentrations of iron found in meteorites. So it was concluded that King Tut’s dagger was most probably the product of a meteorite. This fact is really out of this world.
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