King Tutankhamun’s dagger of space origin, research suggests

King Tutankhamun’s dagger of space origin, research suggests

Scientists say dagger found in ancient Egyptian King Tutankhamun’s tomb was made with iron from a meteorite.

Whether you have ever turned your mind to the theory that the Great Pyramids in Giza were built by aliens, a new discovery might make just a believer out of you.

Last year, researchers discovered that one of the daggers of the king Tutankhamen was made from a material that was not contained on earth.

 The dagger was found in 1925, three years after the tomb was uncovered. As the English archaeologist, Howard Carter figured out that Tut’s body, two daggers were found hidden in the wrappings.

One of the daggers was made of gold and the other of what Carter thought was iron. Even if the gold was potentially more valuable at the time, the iron dagger still caught the attention of archaeologists.

In the Bronze Age, iron was considered even more valuable than gold, as it was extremely rare. The first reference to iron being used in the Nile Valley wasn’t until long after Tut’s time, in the first millennium B.C.

Because of that, most archaeologists agreed that the metal that was used to create Tut’s dagger was most likely meteoric metal, a substance that Tut-era Egyptians referred to as “iron from the sky.”

In the 70s and 90s, researchers toyed with the idea that the blade could have come from a meteorite, but their results were inconclusive. However, last year, a team of Italian and Egyptian researchers employed new technology called an X-ray fluorescence spectrometry to take another look.

Their findings? The blade’s composition of iron, nickel, and cobalt “strongly suggests an extraterrestrial origin.”

A meteorite found in the seaport city of Marsa Matruh, which is 150 miles west of Alexandria, also had a similar composition to the dagger, lending merit to the scientists’ discovery.

The researchers hope that the discovery will help in the dating of other items found in the tomb, that were previously believed to be iron. They also hope that it will give insight to the other uses of meteoric metals at the time.

Though it may seem impossible that King Tutankhamen’s tomb still holds secrets left to be discovered, the fact is that because it was so intact, there could be enough in there to keep researchers and archaeologists busy for a very long time.