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> 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
by 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 agoYes the "Opening of the Mouth and Eyes" ceremony used a tool shaped like a constellation it was made of meteoric ion. I think it or any meteoric iron in general was referred to as "Ra's semen" or something like that. It is an adze but I don't even think it has a name or at least nothing in English other than adze. I've seen it described as simply "nw" or "stp". Many ancient languages didn't use vowels.
- aatharuv 3y agoThe written forms of some Afro-Asiatic languages often did not (and still don't) include vowels, as they didn't provide any information that couldn't be gathered through context. The actual languages did have vowels. Coptic, the descendant of Ancient Egyptian used by liturgical purpose by Egyptian Christians uses vowels, while very distantly related Arabic and Hebrew (part of the Semitic branch of Afro Asiatic) don't use vowels except in rare cases.
- wddkcs 3y agoFascinating, I'd never heard of this belief in an iron heavens. Very interesting that the biblical Daniel foretells an empire of iron as the last empire to follow Nebuchadnezzar's. Would Daniels original audience have read this as a "kingdom from the heaven's" with this Egyptian context in mind?
- antognini 3y agoI'm not sure whether the original audience would have interpreted that as meaning Egypt or not. But by the time of Christ that verse was interpreted to mean the Roman Empire, which is one of the reasons there was so much messianic fervor around that time.
- j_french 3y agoThat shameless plug got you a new subscriber here anyway :)