MILAN, ITALY—Daniela Comelli of the Polytechnic University of Milan and
her team conducted an analysis of the dagger found in the wrappings of
Tutankhamun’s mummy by Howard Carter in 1925. The dagger, which dates to
the fourteenth century B.C., has a gold handle, a rock crystal pommel, a
gold sheath, and an iron blade. But the ancient Egyptians are thought
to have developed iron smelting much later, in the eighth century B.C.
“The problem is iron working is related to its high melting point,”
Comelli said in an Associated Press
report. “Because of it, early smiths couldn’t heat ore enough to
extract iron and couldn’t forge the iron into weapons.” Using a
technique called X-ray fluorescence, Comelli found that Tutankhamun’s
metal blade contains ten percent nickel and 0.6 percent cobalt, a
composition that is similar to that of known metallic meteorites. The
analysis suggests that the dagger could have been hammered from rare
meteoritic iron, which is thought to have been considered more valuable
than gold.
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