King Tut was buried with some pretty sweet loot.

I’m talking chariots, multiple sarcophagi, and a death mask that has become the  poster child for all of archaeology. But forget all of that, because  my dude also had a space dagger.

The blade was made from meteoric iron. And not only does it look awesome, it can  tell us a lot about the ancient world. I’m talking metalworking techniques,  Bronze Age trade and diplomatic links, and what materials the Egyptians valued most.

It might even be telling us that it  wasn’t Tut’s at all. It was a regift. [♪ INTRO] The Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun  ruled for about a decade, roughly smack dab in the  middle of the 14th century BCE. And among the other jaw-dropping  artifacts found in his tomb, two daggers had been placed on his mummified body.

One had a blade made of gold, and the  other was iron, covered by a gold sheath. Now, iron might sound like an extremely  normal thing for a dagger to be made of. But in the 14th century BCE, Egypt  was still very much in the Bronze Age.

Which, as the name implies, means  they relied on tools made of bronze. A metal alloy made by mixing a bunch of copper with other elements that are…not iron. But that doesn’t mean the  Egyptians couldn’t work with iron at all at this point in history.

In fact, it seems like people  across the ancient Near East really valued a particular type of iron. A type that falls from the  sky in a flash of light, like a falling star or a gift from the gods. I’m talking about iron from meteorites.

In fact, not long after Tut’s time,  the phrase “iron from the sky” entered into the hieroglyphic lexicon. And if we look carefully,  we can find a few examples of meteoritic iron in the archaeological record. For example, at an Egyptian burial site  that’s two thousand years older than Tut’s, archaeologists found beads made  of iron, likely from a meteor.

And over in Anatolia, a.k.a.  modern day Turkey, someone was buried with a space knife of their own  a full millennium before Tut’s time. As for Tut himself, he was buried  with more than a dozen iron objects. The rest were certainly not  as impressive as the dagger, but they suggest that just being made of iron was prestigious enough to snag you a spot  among a Pharaoh’s eternal possessions.

But you may be thinking: how can we possibly know this iron dagger really is a space dagger? How can iron that comes from space be different from iron we get out of the ground? One difference is the presence of nickel.

Iron from meteorites typically contains  at least five percent nickel or more. And scientists have basically  never found an object made of worked terrestrial iron that  contains more than four percent nickel. But at this point, I should probably  say that how much Bronze Age folks used space iron is…um,  “controversial” to say the least.

For example, remember those iron beads  two thousand years older than Tut? Out of six studies conducted over  the span of a good hundred years, four support the conclusion that those beads are made of space iron, while two do not. And it wasn’t until 2016 that the meteoric origin of Tut’s iron dagger became widely accepted.

In a paper published that year,  researchers used a technique called X-ray fluorescence to study the  metallic composition of the dagger. As the name implies, it shoots x-rays at  your object of interest to make things glow. But what’s way more important for this story  is that the technique is one: portable, so you can take the instrument to the museum rather than having to transport  a priceless artifact to the lab.

And two: it’s non-destructive,  because museum curators get really jumpy when you ask to chip  off bits of their collection for science. Using this method, the team established that the dagger’s blade was about 11% nickel. In other words, it’s consistent with  the composition of iron meteorites.

Then, another paper published in 2022 heaped more evidence onto the “from-space” pile. Not only did they find a  composition of about 12% nickel, backing up the paper from 2016,  they also presented evidence that the blade had a characteristic that’s unique to space-based iron:  Widmanstätten patterns. These form when you’ve got two  different iron-nickel minerals trying to grow crystals in the same lump of metal.

That lump also has to start out molten, and then cool down very, very slowly. Like, over millions of years slowly. On Earth, that basically can’t happen, which is why the patterns are unique  to iron ores that fell from space.

The best way to see them is  to slice through a meteorite, and then etch that new surface with an acid. But obviously, the researchers studying  Tut’s dagger weren’t allowed to do that. Instead, they used that x-ray fluorescence tech to map where all the nickel  was throughout the blade.

And according to the  appearance of that nickel map, they claim there’s a hidden Widmanstätten pattern. Now, it’s probably worth noting  that another scientist has called their analytical methods into question. But if there really is such  a pattern to this blade, it would be a clear sign that  it used to be a meteorite.

And it would also tell us something  about how the dagger was made. See, if the iron had been heated enough to melt, the crystals would have vanished…taking  their iconic pattern with them. However, the authors did find  some evidence of heating, like dark spots on the blade.

Taking everything into account,  they concluded the blade had been worked at a relatively low temperature  of around 950 degrees Celsius. And if you’re an expert in Bronze Age  Egypt, you might find that a little funny. Because at the time, Egyptian  ironworking techniques were…not so hot.

Pun intended. Of all the iron objects in Tutenkhamen’s tomb, the space dagger is the lone  standout in terms of quality. As far as we can tell, its quality is  beyond what Egypt was capable of producing.

This leads us to the final  mystery surrounding the dagger. Not just whether it came from  space, but where on Earth it’s from… and who it originally belonged to. Howard Carter himself…the guy  who led the first excavation of Tut’s tomb…speculated the dagger was imported from somewhere like the Mitanni kingdom in Anatolia.

And we actually have written  records to back up this idea. But those records also suggest that the  dagger was never actually meant for Tut. See, there’s an extensive cache  of diplomatic correspondence known as the Amarna letters.

They all date to just before King Tut’s  time, and were written not in Egyptian, but in Akkadian…the diplomatic  language of the day. One of these letters describes the marriage  of a Mitanni princess to Amenhotep III, the pharaoh who was probably Tut’s grandfather. It also describes lavish gifts that  were sent along with the princess… including an iron dagger with a gold sheath.

But was it the same iron  dagger with a gold sheath? Well, the authors of that 2022 paper performed a chemical analysis of the dagger’s hilt. When they looked at the plaster used to glue little ornamentations onto it, they found calcium.

Egyptians didn’t make plasters with  calcium, at least not at that time. But you know who did? That’s right.

Anatolia. It’s not a smoking gun…and technically,  the calcium could have been the result of contamination, instead of  actually being a component in the plaster. But it does hint that Tut’s  space dagger was originally meant as a diplomatic gift to  Tut’s grandfather, not Tut himself.

Although if that’s the case, it makes me wonder why Tutankhamun was buried with a regift? We can only speculate. Like, one of the things Tut is  famous for is dying relatively young.

So maybe his court had to scramble  for enough high-prestige items to put together a suitable royal burial. Meanwhile, his grandpa had  enough fancy personal possessions that he wasn’t buried with  one of his many wedding gifts. Or maybe, the ancient Egyptians were just like us, and weren’t above a little  regifting from time to time.

I know I’d love to get a  space dagger for a present, no matter how many hands it had to pass through. [♪ OUTRO]