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An arrowhead made of meteoritic iron from the late Bronze Age
- jjk166 3y agoI would think a society that has no access to iron except for the extremely occasional meteorite would use it for something less mundane than an arrowhead. Especially if it was transported many hundreds of kilometers from where it was found, this must have been a valued treasure.
- PrayagBhakar 3y agoOr humans thought it was a gift from god and immediately used it to make a weapon
- mkoubaa 3y agoI wouldn't assume this particular arrowhead was used as a weapon
- hoosieree 3y agoThere are easier sources for iron: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bog_iron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bog_iron
- mr_toad 3y agoThat’s iron ore, which needs to be smelted. If you can smelt it you’re no longer in the Bronze Age. Meteoric iron can be pure enough to work without smelting.
- ffhhttt 3y agoIt seems that iron smelting preceded the bronze age in the middle east by several hundred years. Early iron wasn’t very good metal and it made sense sticking to bronze as long as you could afford it and had access to tin and copper)
- rustymonday 3y agoYou're absolutely right. Though I don't understand why this idea persists - even in academic scholarship. It has been proven decades ago that non-meteoric iron was smelted in the Early Bronze Age. Though the main reason bronze was used for so long appears to be because it was actually cheaper than iron. Smelting iron required the burning of an absurd amount of trees, which was extremely expensive.
- postalrat 3y agoAncient man finds a cool rock and immediately thinks about the cool weapons he can make from it.
- senectus1 3y agoyeah... bronze age hacker :-D
- hoosieree 3y agoOne day far from now, in our hour of need, the hero will return and I'm pretty sure they're gonna need that arrowhead.
- angiosperm 3y agoI have seen a suggestion that the "thunderbolt" (as usually translated) that damaged the Sphinx, as mentioned on the "Inventory Stela", was a meteorite, which seems more plausible than the usual interpretation as a lightning strike. Ancient Egyptians understood that meteoritic iron, thus meteorites, came from the sky, although I don't think we know how they knew. Finding a meteorite to have knocked off part of the Sphinx would be pretty convincing to them. Note that the dating of the Sphinx, implied by the Inventory Stela, as older than Khufu is pretty universally discounted by egyptologists as historical revisionism. I.e., when the stela was carved, apparently c. 1500 BC, its authors sought to mislead about events a thousand years earlier to make the Isis temple seem older than it was.
- antognini 3y ago> Ancient Egyptians understood that meteoritic iron, thus meteorites, came from the sky, although I don't think we know how they knew. The oldest evidence for this comes from a variety of very old texts carved into the tombs of the pyramids (called the Pyramid texts). The Egyptians conceived of the sky as being made of iron, above which was water. The oldest text, for instance, says that Unas (the Pharaoh), "will acquire the sky and splits its iron." But there are lots of other examples in the texts where the Egyptians make clear that the sky was made of iron. For what it's worth we know that the Egyptians had meteoric iron and considered it to be valuable. King Tutankhamun, for instance, was buried with a dagger made of meteoric iron. One of the more intriguing features around Egypt is the Gebel Kamil crater, which is an impact crater from a meteor 1.3 meters large that landed around 3000 BC, a few hundred miles to the west of the Nile in southern Egypt. It would easily have been visible to the ancient Egyptians in the sky when it fell. Amazingly, the site is so remote and meteorologically stable that it is the best preserved impact crater of its size on the planet, and it wasn't discovered until 2008 when someone stumbled across it on Google Earth. [Shameless plug: if anyone is interesting in learning more, I recently wrapped up a three-episode series about Egyptian astronomy on my podcast about the history of astronomy: https://songofurania.com/episode/030 https://songofurania.com/episode/030]
- dghughes 3y ago
- rdevsrex 3y agoThat's cool. Fun fact: around that same time period, the first iron smelting we know of was done in Africa.
- NDizzle 3y agoOh man what a cheat code that must have been. Some tribe rolled a 20 and got to pull from a damn meteor.
- mcpackieh 3y ago> A single object made of meteoritic iron has been identified, an arrowhead with a mass of 2.9 g found in the 19th Century in the late Bronze Age (900–800 BCE) A cool and important finding no doubt, but there are much more impressive examples. Tutankhamun's meteoric iron dagger is from several hundred years earlier and is longer than your forearm.
- Telemakhos 3y agoIsn't basically all iron from the bronze age meteoric? There isn't much telluric iron metal in the world, and smelting iron ore doesn't happen much until the drum roll iron age. If you're a bronze age craftsman looking to make something of iron (why, when you have bronze?), your best (practically only) source is meteoric iron.
- mcpackieh 3y agoThe catch is that the iron age happened at different times in different places. When that Egyptian dagger was likely made, people were already smelting iron in India and sub-Saharan Africa. Chemical analysis can rule that out though, lots of nickel and very little carbon indicate that it came from a meteorite.
- rustymonday 3y agoNo. Iron has been smelted in Anatolia since 2500 BC. It was initially believe that this iron must have been meteoric, but isotonic analysis done in the last few decades has shown that much of this early iron is in fact non-meteoric.
- credit_guy 3y agoI don't know, I personally find this much more interesting a discovery than Tutankhamun's dagger. While Tutankhamun's dagger is very much consistent with my understanding of history, this discovery pretty much upends it. Tutankhamun was the king of one of the most powerful kingdoms of the peak of the late bronze age. Him having a dagger made out of meteoric iron does not surprise me in the least, as long as I'm aware that meteoric iron was a thing. But what we have here is very surprising (for me at least) on two counts. First, it's an arrowhead discovered about 1600 km from its likely source, the place where a meteor fell a good 600 to 700 years prior. Based on Ni–Ge concentrations and shielding derived from 26Al activity of the arrowhead, the Kaalijarv (Estonia) meteorite with a Bronze Age impact age (∼1500 BCE) appears to be a possible source candidate, implying a transport over ∼1600 km. That would be pretty much "meh". But, but ... In the middle of this 6 or 7 centuries we have the bronze age collapse. You'd think trade ceased. With this discovery, it looks like trade continued quite ok. The other thing that I found surprising was the reuse/recycling. When we think of weapons in antiquity we generally don't think of how hard it was to make metal weapons. Until now I didn't ever stop for a second to think what happened to arrows used in battles or hunts. I always assumed the archers would fire their arrows, then go get some other arrows. But with this discovery, I'm now thinking that people were actually going over the scene of a battle and retrieving all the arrows they could (most likely along with whatever other metal things they could find, like swords, shields, axes, helmets, spearheads). One could say that people valued meteoric iron more than the more common bronze, and this is possible. But unlikely. I think people were simply reusing everything that could be reused. And so an arrowhead could still be in use for hundreds of years. At least this particular arrowhead.