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Ancient Egyptian Bling from Outer Space Screws Up Historic Timeline for Metalcrafting

By Rain Noe - August 22, 2013

in Materials

In the early 1900s, guys dressed like Indiana Jones were ripping through Egyptian tombs in a somewhat shameless search for treasure. In 1911 a collection of elementally rare beads was uncovered in a 5,000-year-old tomb south of Cairo. Primitive early-20th-century tests revealed the beads had an unusually high nickel content, and it was assumed that they were carved out of meteorites.

As Live Science reports, archaeology professor Thilo Rehren recently made a more startling discovery. By X-raying the beads, Rehren and his team observed an elemental composition consistent with iron meteorites, which merely confirmed suspicions; but the X-rays also showed that these beads were actually tubes, presumably made by hammering the raw material into thin sheets and then rolling it.

The reason why this is nuts: The Iron Age, when humans started blacksmithing, is widely agreed to have started 3,000 years ago. But these space beads are made with those techniques, and are from a tomb that's 5,000 years old—that's the Stone Age.

"This shows that these people, at this early age, were capable of blacksmithing," Rehren said. "It shows a pretty advanced skill with this difficult material. It might not have been on large scales, but by the time of the Iron Age, they had about 2,000 years of experience working with meteoritic iron."

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daniel erwin

11 years ago

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Similar assumptions used to be made regarding copper beads, but analysis showed the tubes could be made cold. see "a Search For Structure" by metallurgist Cyril Stanley Smith, MIT Press 1981, pg. 78.
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Toby

11 years ago

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I am not an Egyptologist, but I think it's well-known that the ancient Egyptians used iron tools for specialized tasks (some woodworking, other metalworking). I would say that blacksmithing in the rest of Africa is more interesting, since it emerged without any tradition of copper / tin / bronze-working preceding it.
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San

11 years ago

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Doesn't stuff in the lab take a along time to become mass market? May be that was the case. In this case it took about 2000 years...
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D

11 years ago

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Am I mistaken or does the middle piece say $07.54
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Tom Mc

11 years ago

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Where'd they learn such crafts?
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Alex

11 years ago

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didn't expect to hear that, but kudos to Catharsis for dropping knowledge!
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Vijay

11 years ago

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I love this. Just the kind of knock on the head we need, let's all eat some humble pie.
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Catharsis

11 years ago

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That's pretty interesting considering the forging of iron is mentioned in Genesis 4:22, in the Bible - in a genealogy of people who lived a little over 5,000 years ago! Maybe those genealogies aren't as boring as I used to think they were - haha. Just more evidence that the Bible is accurate.
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