Fans of "Ancient Aliens" are going to love this... King Tut's dagger is from outer space !
Well, at least sort of... The material came from outer space.
A paper by researchers from Polytechnic University of Milan reveals that the ancient dagger was made from the iron of a meteorite!
The infamous ancient teenage king's dagger is complete with fancy gold fixtures and a golden sheathe... but that iron blade, that iron journeyed from far, far away...
Scientists compared the metal of Tut's dagger to 11 existing analyses of metal meteorites, noting that the iron contained the same types of impurities. These even included bits of cobalt and nickel, which are characteristic of iron meteorites.
Iron didn't become common in Egypt until hundreds of years after Tut ruled.
As iron melts at a higher temperature, it was difficult to forge with the common technology of 14th century BC Egypt. The scientists believe Tut's dagger was likely formed using hammers and was not heated to high temperatures.
The authors of the study speculate that the iron may have been perceived as more valuable than gold, since it fell from the sky.
"The sky was very important to the ancient Egyptians," Joyce Tyldesley, an Egyptologist at the University of Manchester and a co-author of the paper told Nature . "Something that falls from the sky is going to be considered as a gift from the gods."
While Tut's extraterrestrial dagger doesn't connect ancient Egyptians any more strongly with aliens... It's still super cool!
