Archaeology & History

Ancient Egyptian jewellery came from space

By T.K. Randall
August 20, 2013 ·  17 comments

Image Credit: CC 3.0 Jurii The ancient Egyptians were no stranger to cosmology and now it turns out that even some of their jewellery was created out of materials from space. Archaeologists studying a set of nine iron funeral beads discovered in a 5000-year-old cemetery in 1911 believe that the beads themselves are made using metal recovered from a meteorite that crashed on to our planet in 3200BC.

The discovery indicates that the ancient Egyptians were capable of far more advanced metalworking techniques than was previously thought. "The results confirm that already in the fourth millennium BC metalworkers had mastered the smithing of meteoritic iron, an iron–nickel alloy much harder and more brittle than the more commonly worked copper," the study team wrote.[!gad]The ancient Egyptians were no stranger to cosmology and now it turns out that even some of their jewellery was created out of materials from space. Archaeologists studying a set of nine iron funeral beads discovered in a 5000-year-old cemetery in 1911 believe that the beads themselves are made using metal recovered from a meteorite that crashed on to our planet in 3200BC.

The discovery indicates that the ancient Egyptians were capable of far more advanced metalworking techniques than was previously thought. "The results confirm that already in the fourth millennium BC metalworkers had mastered the smithing of meteoritic iron, an iron–nickel alloy much harder and more brittle than the more commonly worked copper," the study team wrote.

Source: IB Times | Comments (17)

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