Dr Diane Johnson from the Department of Physical Sciences at OU and her team have found conclusive evidence that a five thousand years old Egyptian bead was made from a meteorite, settling a long scientific argument and shedding new light on the origins of the religion in the land of Pharaohs.
One of the oldest known Egyptian iron artefacts, a small tube-shaped bead, has been the subject of a long scientific debate. Found in 1911 in a cemetery at Gerzeh, around 70 kilometres south of Cairo, and dating from 3350 to 3600 BC, three thousand years before Egypt’s Iron Age, the bead was first assumed to be from a meteorite, following a study of its nickel content. But this hypothesis was challenged in the 1980s when academics proposed that much of the early worldwide examples of iron objects, thought to have originated in space, were actually early smelting attempts. The challenge turned out to be wrong in the case of the bead. The trinket did come from the sky.
The conclusive proof was found by Dr Diane Johnson and her collaborators from the University of Manchester, who used scanning electron microscopy and computed tomography to establish the metal composition of the bead. The researchers were not allowed to cut the artefact open, but they found areas where some surface material had fallen away.
The tiny openings, or 'windows', as described by Dr Johnson, allowed precise measurements to be taken and the nickel content to be established at a significantly high level of 30 percent, suggesting that the object originated from a meteorite. The conclusions were confirmed by additional observations of a distinctive crystalline structure, which is found only in iron meteorites.
The research was covered by the journal Nature which noted the significance of the findings to our understanding of the development of the religion in ancient Egypt. Meteorite iron had profound implications for the early Egyptians, both in their perception of the iron in the context of its celestial origin and in early metallurgy attempts.
The results of the study can be found in the paper, ‘Analysis of a Prehistoric Egyptian Iron Bead with Implications for the use and perception of meteorite iron in ancient Egypt’ published in the Meteoritics and Planetary Science journal.
Posted 30 May 2013
