Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb. We're out this week, so we have
Speaker 1: some episodes from the vault here for you. This is
Speaker 1: going to be part one of our series on meteoric
Speaker 1: metal and alien iron. This one originally published five seven,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3: And I'm Joe McCormick. And today on Stuff to Blow
Speaker 3: Your Mind, we wanted to kick off a series of
Speaker 3: episodes on tools, blades, weapons, artifacts, ceremonial ornaments, and various
Speaker 3: things things made by humans out of materials that came
Speaker 3: from outer space, particularly stuff made from mediorite iron.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So, whether you've listened to our show before or not,
Speaker 1: you're probably familiar with the three age system of classifying
Speaker 1: ancient civilizations, defining them by their material and the technological
Speaker 1: level of advancement for that given civilization. And this is
Speaker 1: not without its complexity and even its controversy, as we'll
Speaker 1: get into, but it divides things into the Stone Age,
Speaker 1: the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age. In this series
Speaker 1: of episodes, from stuff to blow your mind. We're going
Speaker 1: to be dealing predominantly with the age of bronze, typified
Speaker 1: by its bronze production and lasting very roughly, and these
Speaker 1: dates are not solid for all places and civilizations. A
Speaker 1: strong caveat there from somewhere around thirty three hundred to
Speaker 1: twelve hundred BCE. So we're dealing with a very amorphous
Speaker 1: period of time here, and the transference into the Age
Speaker 1: of Iron is much the same. But before we jump
Speaker 1: into the key example that we're going to be looking
Speaker 1: at in this episode, I just wanted to share a
Speaker 1: couple of quotes to perhaps help put this time frame
Speaker 1: in perspective and even cast a different light on civilization
Speaker 1: before the widespread production and use of iron. Both of
Speaker 1: these are from books that deal more specifically with Chinese
Speaker 1: technology and Chinese history, but I believe some of the
Speaker 1: takeaways from both of these quotes are just appliable across
Speaker 1: the board. So this first one is a quote from
Speaker 1: John Key in his book A History of China. He writes, quote, Indeed,
Speaker 1: bronze came to occupy much the same position in ancient
Speaker 1: China as stone in the contemporary civilization of Egypt or
Speaker 1: later those of Iran, Persia and Greece. Enormous effort was
Speaker 1: devoted to producing bronzewere highly sophisticated ideas were expressed through it.
Speaker 1: Some of the earliest inscriptions were found on it, and
Speaker 1: its durability has ensured that plentiful examples have survived. And
Speaker 1: this other quote is from Joseph Needham, whose work we've
Speaker 1: discussed in the show before, from Science and Society in
Speaker 1: Ancient China quote, it looks as if the earliest kings
Speaker 1: or feudal princes recognized bronze metallurgy to be the basis
Speaker 1: of feudal power over the Neolithic peasantry because of the
Speaker 1: superior arms which it rendered possible, and therefore they appropriated
Speaker 1: that the technique of metalworking. So what I like about
Speaker 1: these two quotes is I think they helped drive home
Speaker 1: that bronze was not only a material for tools, but
Speaker 1: a material through which culture was made manifest, as well
Speaker 1: as a source of power, both in physical weaponry and
Speaker 1: even just as an idea. And while these examples, again
Speaker 1: are both from texts that focus exclusively on Chinese history,
Speaker 1: I think you can sort of get a broader take
Speaker 1: home from them, Like I said earlier, So on top
Speaker 1: of that, I would say, also, I think it's essential
Speaker 1: to keep in mind that the Bronze age was far
Speaker 1: from just a period between or a precursor to something
Speaker 1: better or more advanced. It was a time of great
Speaker 1: technological and cultural advancement. It was the age of the
Speaker 1: wheel of irrigation, writing systems, enhanced weaponry, and much more.
Speaker 1: And it's not merely the time before iron. It is
Speaker 1: the time that gave birth to iron technology as well well.
Speaker 3: And I think that can really be driven home in
Speaker 3: the fact that iron is not even necessarily for all
Speaker 3: uses a superior metal to bronze. Bronze could be considered
Speaker 3: materially superior in some ways. It's just that iron, once
Speaker 3: you have the technology to smelt it and then work
Speaker 3: it in the high temperatures you need, it is easier
Speaker 3: to produce at mass scales and cheaper.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, there's definitely from what I've read, there's
Speaker 1: definitely a period of time in which your early smelted
Speaker 1: iron tools, weapons, what have you are not going to
Speaker 1: be as durable and as highly efficient as the high
Speaker 1: end bronze weapons and tools of that same time period.
Speaker 4: But you can make more of them.
Speaker 1: Right, right, But eventually, of course iron comes to.
Speaker 3: Dominate, especially in the form of steel.
Speaker 1: Yes, I know some will say steel isn't strong, flesh
Speaker 1: is strong, YadA, YadA, YadA, but steel's pretty strong. Well.
Speaker 3: I do want to start within one of the regional
Speaker 3: Bronze ages to start off today's episode by looking at
Speaker 3: a very intriguing and mysterious artifact from ancient Egypt. This
Speaker 3: is a dagger from the stars found buried alongside the
Speaker 3: pharaoh tutin Common. So the tomb of the eighteenth dynasty
Speaker 3: Egyptian pharaoh tutin Common was uncovered by the British archaeologist
Speaker 3: Howard Carter and his team in nineteen twenty two. Tuton
Speaker 3: Common reigned from thirteen sixty one to thirteen fifty two BCE,
Speaker 3: becoming king around the age of nine or so, unruling
Speaker 3: until his early death around the age of eighteen. Tutin
Speaker 3: Common is thought to have been a son of the
Speaker 3: pharaoh Akinaten, though from what I understand this relationship is
Speaker 3: not totally certain. There is a DNA relation to another
Speaker 3: mummy that has been found that is presumed to be Acinatin,
Speaker 3: but it's not known for sure. Acintin, his likely father,
Speaker 3: was notable for trying to replace the traditional polytheistic religion
Speaker 3: of Egypt with a it's debatable how to characterize this,
Speaker 3: but a monotheistic or monolteristic or perhaps henotheistic, whatever you
Speaker 3: call it, focus on a single god, an emphasis of
Speaker 3: one God above all the others from the Egyptian pantheon,
Speaker 3: and that is the solar deity Aughtan, which took the
Speaker 3: form of the disk of the Sun. We've talked about
Speaker 3: that sort of attempt to go one God early in
Speaker 3: Egypt before, but this shift did not last long after
Speaker 3: Acinatin's death, and one of Tutonkommon's main accomplishments as pharaoh
Speaker 3: seems to have been the restoration of the old polytheistic cults.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the rejection of new coke and the reacceptance of
Speaker 1: old coke.
Speaker 3: Play in the hits getting the old gang together. So
Speaker 3: Tummons Tomb was considered a very special discovery in the
Speaker 3: twentieth century because even though it had been partially looted
Speaker 3: at least twice shortly after it was sealed, it was
Speaker 3: still considered relatively intact compared to other tombs. So many
Speaker 3: of the original grave goods were still in place, and
Speaker 3: this was not really the case at all for most
Speaker 3: of the other royal tombs of ancient Egypt. They were
Speaker 3: mostly scoured by grave robbers thousands of years ago. This
Speaker 3: is sometimes misstated as saying that that tuten Coommon's Tune
Speaker 3: tomb had never been disturbed, and that's not true. It
Speaker 3: was robbed long ago like all the rest of them,
Speaker 3: it just didn't get robbed as much. And some have
Speaker 3: speculated that Tuten Common's tomb was relatively well preserved because
Speaker 3: the entrance got covered up by stuff and people pretty
Speaker 3: quickly forgot where it was. And so when this tomb
Speaker 3: was rediscovered in the twentieth century, it contained a wealth
Speaker 3: of treasures and a beautiful, wonderful glimpse into the past.
Speaker 3: So for a taste of the variety of objects found
Speaker 3: in the tomb, I just wanted to read directly from
Speaker 3: the diary entry of Howard Carter describing the day of
Speaker 3: November twenty sixth, nineteen twenty two, when his team finally
Speaker 3: cleared away the last of the rubble from the passageway
Speaker 3: into the tomb and got the first look inside. So
Speaker 3: Carter writes, quote, it was some time before one could see.
Speaker 3: The hot air escaping caused the candle to flicker, But
Speaker 3: as soon as one's eyes became accustomed to the glimmer
Speaker 3: of light, the interior of the chamber gradually loomed before one,
Speaker 3: with its strange and wonderful medley of extraordinary and beautiful
Speaker 3: objects heaped upon one another. There was naturally short suspense
Speaker 3: for those present who could not see. When Lord Carnivon
Speaker 3: said to me, can you see anything? I replied to him, yes,
Speaker 3: it is wonderful. I then, with precaution, made the whole
Speaker 3: sufficiently large for both of us to see. With the
Speaker 3: light of an electric torch as well as an additional candle,
Speaker 3: we looked in. Our sensations and astonishment are difficult to describe,
Speaker 3: as the better light revealed to us the marvelous collection
Speaker 3: of treasures. Two strange ebony black effigies of a king,
Speaker 3: gold sandaled bearing staff and mace loomed out from the
Speaker 3: cloak of darkness. Gilded couches in strange forms lion headed,
Speaker 3: hathor headed, and beast infernal, exquisitely painted inlaid and ornamental caskets, flowers,
Speaker 3: alabaster vases, some beautifully executed of lotus and papyrus device,
Speaker 3: strange black shrines with a gilded monster snake appearing from within,
Speaker 3: quite ordinary looking white chests, finely carved chairs, a golden
Speaker 3: inlaid throne, a heap of large, curious white oviform boxes
Speaker 3: beneath our very eyes on the threshold, a lovely lodiform
Speaker 3: wishing cup in translucent alabaster, stools of all shapes and
Speaker 3: design of both common and rare materials. And lastly, a
Speaker 3: confusion of overturned parts of chariots glinting with gold, peering
Speaker 3: from amongst which was a mannequin, the first impression of
Speaker 3: which suggested the property room of an opera of a
Speaker 3: vanished civilization. Our sensations were bewildering and full of strange emotion.
Speaker 3: We questioned one another as to the meaning of it all.
Speaker 3: Was it a tomb or merely a cash A sealed
Speaker 3: doorway between the two sentinel statues proved there was more beyond,
Speaker 3: and with the numerous cartouches bearing the name of Touton
Speaker 3: common on most of the objects before us, there was
Speaker 3: little doubt that there behind was the grave of that pharaoh.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I like the atmosphere. He captures here in
Speaker 1: this description.
Speaker 3: One of my favorite things is the description of the
Speaker 3: disassembled parts of the chariot all there piled.
Speaker 4: Up in the tomb.
Speaker 3: Anyway, documenting the contents of the tomb went on for
Speaker 3: years after the initial discovery, and one of the objects
Speaker 3: found later, this was in nineteen twenty five. This was
Speaker 3: buried right alone along with the pharaoh's body. One of
Speaker 3: these artifacts, it was a beautiful dagger. In fact, there
Speaker 3: were two daggers buried with toot and common, one made
Speaker 3: of gold and another made of iron. And ironically it's
Speaker 3: the iron dagger that I would like to focus on,
Speaker 3: so Rob, I've got some pictures for you to look
Speaker 3: at here, sort of like with different sides of the
Speaker 3: dagger facing and then different types of illumination. But the
Speaker 3: iron dagger is a little over a foot long, and
Speaker 3: it was found not only within the king's tomb, but
Speaker 3: with his mummified remains inside the inner coffin, and in fact,
Speaker 3: not only in the inner coffin, but literally inside the
Speaker 3: king's wrappings, so wrapped up with him up against his thigh,
Speaker 3: the gold dagger was apparently on his abdomen.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a very splendid looking weapon, and there are
Speaker 1: no shortage of images of this, you can easily look
Speaker 1: up online.
Speaker 3: So the knife has a handle made out of gold
Speaker 3: with a crystal knob on the end, sort of very
Speaker 3: smooth and rounded off crystal knob, and a golden sheath
Speaker 3: decorated with images of on one part a repeating feather pattern.
Speaker 3: There are flowers I think maybe supposed to be lilli's,
Speaker 3: and there's also a jackal's head. And surprisingly, this dagger
Speaker 3: made out of iron remained relatively rust free for all
Speaker 3: these centuries. Though it does have blemishes, they're not rust Instead,
Speaker 3: it has black spots in the middle that to me
Speaker 3: almost look like lunar maria.
Speaker 4: They're these sort.
Speaker 3: Of you know, strange, beautiful little black depressions that have
Speaker 3: almost geographical looking edges.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So this.
Speaker 3: Dagger made of iron was instantly quite interesting to experts
Speaker 3: because it was made of iron. Toot In Common lived
Speaker 3: at a time when iron artifacts were quite rare in Egypt,
Speaker 3: not completely non existent, but precious and few. We associate
Speaker 3: iron today with raw utility. I think of like just
Speaker 3: stacks of rebar and stuff, you know, Like we think
Speaker 3: of its hardness and toughness and its ready availability. So,
Speaker 3: of course iron and steel, steel being a product of iron,
Speaker 3: are thought of as useful for making durable workaday tools
Speaker 3: machine parts, in architecture, for making bridges and framing buildings
Speaker 3: and so forth. But in Tutan Commons Egypt, the evidence
Speaker 3: indicates that the rare iron artifacts that did exist were
Speaker 3: treated instead as sacred, decorative and ceremonial items, more like
Speaker 3: we treat gold and silver today, except perhaps even more precious. Now,
Speaker 3: why would something as cheap, abundant and mundane as iron
Speaker 3: be treated as precious sacred material. It seems to be
Speaker 3: because at the time iron was anything but abundant and mundane.
Speaker 3: The mundane iron that we think of today is extracted
Speaker 3: from iron ore that we mine out of the ground,
Speaker 3: and then we extract in pure metallic form from its
Speaker 3: ore form in extremely hot furnaces. And while there were
Speaker 3: plenty of iron ore deposits in the deserts of Egypt,
Speaker 3: there was not a widespread industry that was able to
Speaker 3: separate pure metallic iron from its ore in the region
Speaker 3: until several hundred years later. Now, why was iron harder
Speaker 3: to work with and extract than other metals such as
Speaker 3: the copper tin alloy that forms the basis of ancient bronze.
Speaker 3: I think that there's sort of a more complicated answer
Speaker 3: and a sort of a simpler answer, And the simpler
Speaker 3: answer is basically higher melting point, Like it takes more
Speaker 3: energy to extract iron from its ore, and it takes
Speaker 3: more heat to make it malleable and workable once it
Speaker 3: is extracted.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I remember we went into some of this
Speaker 1: back when we did an episode on the One Ring
Speaker 1: of the Lord of the Rings, and you know, talking
Speaker 1: about what kind of metals would would melt or not
Speaker 1: melt the constraints that are laid out in the text.
Speaker 3: However, there was one source of pure or to some
Speaker 3: degree pure metallic iron available before the smelting process was developed,
Speaker 3: and that source of metallic iron was meteorites, chunks of
Speaker 3: iron that fell from space. So experts have for a
Speaker 3: long time suggested that maybe King Tut's dagger, and not
Speaker 3: just his dagger, but other iron artifacts that were also
Speaker 3: found within the tomb and other iron artifacts from ancient
Speaker 3: Egypt from this period and before, were in fact meteoric
Speaker 3: in origin, that they were hammered out of iron that
Speaker 3: fell to Earth from the sky.
Speaker 1: So your exploitive headline here, of course, is ancient Egyptian
Speaker 1: to use space weapons, and I've seen various indulgences of
Speaker 1: that sort of thing. But I mean, yeah, you're not
Speaker 1: too far off the mark with that, even if you
Speaker 1: are implying things that are not true as well. I've
Speaker 1: even seen alien weapons mentioned before.
Speaker 3: Now before those of you get too excited, no this,
Speaker 3: this is not ancient alien stuff.
Speaker 4: No, this would be.
Speaker 3: This does not need to be a gift from aliens
Speaker 3: that came from above, because meteorites still land on Earth today.
Speaker 3: They land naturally. People can find them.
Speaker 1: Right right, And that of course is especially true if
Speaker 1: you if in one or two situations with meteorites, is
Speaker 1: it dramatic in its entry or do you have an
Speaker 1: environment in which objects like this are easy to find,
Speaker 1: such as a desert. So you will find various desert
Speaker 1: environments where there is a long tradition of gathering such
Speaker 1: meteorites because they stand out more. But you know, even
Speaker 1: if you see or think you see something fall, you
Speaker 1: can also get into trouble trying to to find what
Speaker 1: fell from the sky. We've talked about the the phenomena
Speaker 1: of star jelly before. This is where someone sees a
Speaker 1: shooting star or things of meteorite fallen in their general
Speaker 1: vicinity and they go out into the woods and they
Speaker 1: start poking around. Do they find something that they think
Speaker 1: looks weird? And it may be like just some sort
Speaker 1: of slimy substance in the forest. It's a slimy substance
Speaker 1: that was always there or is frequently there, but they
Speaker 1: just never went out and poked it and looked for
Speaker 1: it before. So ultimately you have to know what you're doing.
Speaker 1: But a desert environment can be a real gift to
Speaker 1: the meteorite.
Speaker 4: Hunter, that's right.
Speaker 3: So what is a meteorite, Well, a meteorite is, in short,
Speaker 3: any solid natural object that falls from space through our
Speaker 3: atmosphere and reaches the surface of the Earth intact. And
Speaker 3: this usually means a chunk of a rocky asteroid. It
Speaker 3: seems that's what it is in most cases, but some
Speaker 3: cases could possibly mean pieces of comets or even pieces
Speaker 3: of other planets. Sometimes there'll be an impact and a
Speaker 3: piece of Mars or something else breaks off and will
Speaker 3: end up falling to Earth somehow. Now, most meteorites found
Speaker 3: on Earth are not primarily of iron. There are three
Speaker 3: main types of meteorites. You've got stony meteorites, which are
Speaker 3: made mostly of silicon based rock. There are iron meteorites,
Speaker 3: which are primarily made of solid metal, mostly iron, with
Speaker 3: some nickel and other trace metals. And then there's a
Speaker 3: hybrid category which are often considered quite beautiful. Maybe the
Speaker 3: most visually striking of all of them, the stony iron meteorites,
Speaker 3: which are a pretty close to even mix of iron
Speaker 3: metal and silicate rock. Now, iron meteorites are not the
Speaker 3: most common types of meteorites to fall to Earth. I've
Speaker 3: read estimates that they're only about like five or six
Speaker 3: percent of meteorite falls. But they are sometimes easier to
Speaker 3: find than stony meteorites, and this might be in part
Speaker 3: due to their durability and the environment and the really
Speaker 3: stick around, but also probably in part because they look
Speaker 3: weirder and more alien. And stony meteorites can look a
Speaker 3: lot of different ways, but rob I just attached a
Speaker 3: few examples for you to look at. A lot of
Speaker 3: stony meteorites you could easily mistake for an earth based rock,
Speaker 3: but iron meteorites more often, I guess you could still
Speaker 3: mistake them for an earth based rock, but more of
Speaker 3: them look like really strange.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they have a very novel appearance that even the
Speaker 1: novice would would likely look at and think, well, that's interesting.
Speaker 1: I should pick that up and maybe take this back
Speaker 1: and show it to someone who knows what's up with rocks,
Speaker 1: because yeah, they have this fascinating kind of you know,
Speaker 1: like cool liquid kind of appearance with all these dimples
Speaker 1: and creases and so forth.
Speaker 3: Why is this a metal brain the size of a
Speaker 3: bear in the middle of the desert?
Speaker 4: What is that?
Speaker 3: Iron meteorites are thought to probably be the remaining cores
Speaker 3: of asteroids that at some point asteroids or parts of
Speaker 3: former planetesimals that at some point melted and then re solidified.
Speaker 3: They're mostly made of iron, Like I said, they have
Speaker 3: some nickel content, as well as other traces of minerals
Speaker 3: and metals, some cobalt content, some phosphorus, some sulfur, and
Speaker 3: so forth. They are often found on Earth covered in
Speaker 3: a black or rusty crust of iron oxide that forms
Speaker 3: as they travel through the atmosphere. And there are two
Speaker 3: primary minerals found in iron meteorites. You've got camosite, which
Speaker 3: has relatively less nickel, and taanite, which has relatively more
Speaker 3: Within iron meteorites. These two minerals camosite and taanite are
Speaker 3: quite often found in an interesting interlocking crystal structure, which
Speaker 3: when you cut a cross section of one of these
Speaker 3: meteorites and you treat it with a weak or diluted acid,
Speaker 3: it reveals this repeating arrangement of lines known as a
Speaker 3: Vidmnstottin pattern. And to try to describe this, it looks
Speaker 3: kind of like a texture of infinite triangles within triangles,
Speaker 3: or you might say, like a actal representation of a
Speaker 3: capital letter A in the English alphabet.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it looks very very sci fi, very futuristic, kind
Speaker 1: of like some sort of you know, a chrome etching
Speaker 1: of the interior scaffolding of the death Star or something.
Speaker 3: To come back to our stuff on, anomalous imagery is
Speaker 3: one of those things that there are all kinds of
Speaker 3: patterns like this in nature that make people say that's technology,
Speaker 3: but no, that's just what these crystals do. And in fact,
Speaker 3: the way this specifically looks seems to be a result
Speaker 3: of creating a two dimensional cross sectional representation of an
Speaker 3: underlying three dimensional structure that's known as an octahedral. So
Speaker 3: an octahedron is a polyhedron, a three dimensional structure with
Speaker 3: eight faces. So you can picture like two four sided
Speaker 3: pyramids joined at the square base. Or if you're a
Speaker 3: D and D player, you just picture a D eight die.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's sematar damage.
Speaker 3: So the octahedral structure is created by the interaction of
Speaker 3: these two different minerals chemousite and taanite. They formed these
Speaker 3: different bands and boundaries, and then when they come together
Speaker 3: like that and you cut through the middle of a
Speaker 3: meteorite and you look at the pattern it makes. It's
Speaker 3: this Vidmuin Stottin pattern. Now, we might come back and
Speaker 3: talk more about iron meteorites themselves in the next episode.
Speaker 3: But an interesting question is, so it was proposed long
Speaker 3: ago that King Tut's dagger, as well as many of
Speaker 3: these other iron artifacts, were made out of meteorite iron.
Speaker 3: But is the dagger really meteorite iron? And if so,
Speaker 3: how could we know? Well, there have been multiple investigations
Speaker 3: of this over the years, and they've come up with
Speaker 3: For a while, they came up with conflicting results. There
Speaker 3: was some controversy over this, were different results, different investigators
Speaker 3: came to different conclusions. But it seems to be that
Speaker 3: the more recent research points very strongly to a meteoric origin.
Speaker 3: So I'll mention a couple of studies. One is by
Speaker 3: Daniellocomelli at All that was published in the journal Metiorritics
Speaker 3: and Planetary Science in the year twenty sixteen, and it's
Speaker 3: called the metiorritic origin of Toutencommon's Iron Dagger Blade. Now,
Speaker 3: one thing that is an obstacle when you're investigating this
Speaker 3: sort of thing is method because modern science has lots
Speaker 3: of very powerful tools of chemical analysis, but many of
Speaker 3: them are destructive techniques, so you would have to destroy
Speaker 3: some small part of the artifact in order to analyze it.
Speaker 3: And for obvious historical preservation reasons, researchers wanted to avoid
Speaker 3: having to destroy part of a priceless historical dagger in
Speaker 3: order to figure out what it's made of. So this investigation,
Speaker 3: which by the way, the team was made up of
Speaker 3: both Italian and Egyptian researchers, they use non destructive methods
Speaker 3: analyze the blade with a non destructive imaging technique called
Speaker 3: X ray fluorescence spectrometry to determine the composition of the blade.
Speaker 3: So the way that works is you bombard the blade
Speaker 3: with some radiation they use like a portable X ray scanner.
Speaker 3: You bombard it with some radiation and then that radiation
Speaker 3: causes the atoms in the blade to fluoresce, to like
Speaker 3: give off light energy as they're you know, as the
Speaker 3: radiation hits the electrons that are orbiting the atoms and
Speaker 3: then causes some of them to fall down to lower
Speaker 3: energy levels, and that puts off radiation in return. And
Speaker 3: by analyzing what gets reflected back, you can see what
Speaker 3: types of elements that it's made of. And what they
Speaker 3: found was that the composition of the blade was iron
Speaker 3: with a high percentage of nickel and cobalt. So I
Speaker 3: think they found that it was mostly iron, with ten
Speaker 3: point eight percent by weight nickel and zero point five
Speaker 3: to eight percent by weight cobalt, and these numbers are
Speaker 3: not to be found in earth based iron generally. Studies
Speaker 3: have found that earth based iron extracted from before like
Speaker 3: the eighteen hundreds tends to always have less than four
Speaker 3: percent nickel by waight.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I was reading some sources about this as well,
Speaker 1: and yeah, a lot of it seems to come back
Speaker 1: to the nickel.
Speaker 3: Though I've read some criticisms that you shouldn't go by
Speaker 3: the nickel alone, and that to really be sure you
Speaker 3: should look at like some other comparison points as well,
Speaker 3: like the ratio of nickel to cobalt. I think some
Speaker 3: other things as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there was one paper I was looking at Albert
Speaker 1: Jambond from twenty seventeen Bronze Age iron meteoritic or not,
Speaker 1: And this is the additional subheading subtitle a chemical strategy.
Speaker 1: And in this one they pointed out like weathering is
Speaker 1: also sometimes something that has to be taken into place
Speaker 1: given the nickel levels that can be detected, and it
Speaker 1: may have to do with like basically a weathering away
Speaker 1: of some of the nickel content at least on the
Speaker 1: testable portions of an artifact.
Speaker 3: But from what I could tell, most researchers are pretty
Speaker 3: well convinced by this and other recent studies. There's another
Speaker 3: one I'm gonna mention in a second saying that this
Speaker 3: probably really is meteorite. So speaking to the BBC, the
Speaker 3: lead author, Daniellacomelli, who by the way, is that she's
Speaker 3: an experimental physicist affiliated with the Polytechnic University of Milan,
Speaker 3: she sounds pretty confident. She says meteoric iron is clearly
Speaker 3: indicated by the presence of this high percentage of nickel,
Speaker 3: and in fact, the authors of this study from twenty
Speaker 3: sixteen even matched the composition of the blade of Tutencommon's
Speaker 3: dagger to that of a known meteorite in the region,
Speaker 3: one which landed about two hundred and forty kilometers west
Speaker 3: of the city of Alexandria. They also argue that the
Speaker 3: blade shows what they call a high manufacturing quality, which
Speaker 3: is not found in some of the other simple article
Speaker 3: facts made out of meteorite iron from this period in Egypt.
Speaker 3: So it shows that someone at this time had the
Speaker 3: ability to work with iron at a high level. But
Speaker 3: this type type of craftsmanship must have been rare.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, rare craftsmanship befitting of a rare material. There's
Speaker 1: there's one little bit I want to side here. This
Speaker 1: is from the Brian and Fagan book The Seventy Great
Speaker 1: Inventions of the Ancient World. Paul Ti Krattic is the
Speaker 1: main writer on a chapter in that that deals with
Speaker 1: with iron and other metals, and Kradick mentions the dagger
Speaker 1: of tutan Common and there's an excellent photo of it
Speaker 1: in that book. But then he adds an additional detail
Speaker 1: from the following century. So this is a different culture
Speaker 1: because as we've already mentioned, there there are other examples
Speaker 1: of meteoric iron being used in you know, in very regal,
Speaker 1: very ornamental pieces like this and this one, this particular
Speaker 1: one is referred to in a letter. This is from
Speaker 1: twelve fifty BCE. We have a letter from the Hittite
Speaker 1: ruler Tatusilius the third to the king of Assyria, and
Speaker 1: in this letter he apologizes for not being able to
Speaker 1: supply iron and instead hopes that the gift of a
Speaker 1: single accompanying iron blade will be acceptable Socratic rights quote.
Speaker 1: So in twelve fifty BC, a single iron blade from
Speaker 1: the one available source of iron was an appropriate placiatory
Speaker 1: gift to another monarch. So, I mean you can also
Speaker 1: see that in the fact that, yeah, King tut is
Speaker 1: buried with one of these blades, you know, within his wrappings.
Speaker 1: But you know, here's this other case where it's like
Speaker 1: it just it just more evidence that like these things
Speaker 1: were so highly valued.
Speaker 4: These are the.
Speaker 1: Kind of things that kings gave to each other, you know,
Speaker 1: these are the kind of things that kings were buried with.
Speaker 1: But Kradack also points out that mere centuries later iron
Speaker 1: making industry would end up stretching across Eurasia. So again,
Speaker 1: iron ore is very common, but it is the last
Speaker 1: metal of antiquity to be smelted, due in part to
Speaker 1: the high melting point.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm almost trying to imagine. I mean, I get
Speaker 3: the change took place. I suppose over a long enough
Speaker 3: period of time that you wouldn't have really had stuff
Speaker 3: like this, I guess, But I'm imagining somebody clutching extremely valuable,
Speaker 3: you know, precious iron artifacts of a ceremonial value, and
Speaker 3: then suddenly, like the you know, the iron working and
Speaker 3: the iron smelting comes into vogue, and now iron is
Speaker 3: all over the place, and it's just it's not the
Speaker 3: same anymore.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but they would still have the appeal of having
Speaker 1: this source that is associated with the sky as having
Speaker 1: come from heaven or from the cosmos and the gods
Speaker 1: and so forth. And that is something that I've I've
Speaker 1: seen reference in some other sources that I'll probably come
Speaker 1: back to later on that, certainly in the Chinese examples,
Speaker 1: you know, the Chinese, the ancient Chinese were aware of meteorites,
Speaker 1: that they knew about these various events, and they wrote
Speaker 1: about them in their early literature, and therefore there was
Speaker 1: likely this connection in place. So it was this precious
Speaker 1: metal that was unlike the metal used for other tools
Speaker 1: and so forth, unlike even other precious metals and other
Speaker 1: stones and so forth that were used. But then there
Speaker 1: was also the story behind it, the idea that it
Speaker 1: has some sort of connection to the cosmos.
Speaker 3: I want to get to something about that story within
Speaker 3: an Egyptian context in just a minute. But first I
Speaker 3: promised I was going to mention another study on the
Speaker 3: meteor origin of the iron in the blade. So the
Speaker 3: other study I wanted to point out was from twenty
Speaker 3: twenty two. This is in the journal I think the
Speaker 3: same journal, Yeah, same journal Media and Planetary Science, And
Speaker 3: this is by Takafumi Matsui at All, and it's called
Speaker 3: the Manufacture and Origin of the Tuton Common Metiorritic Iron Dagger.
Speaker 3: And this paper further supports the conclusion that the iron
Speaker 3: in the King's Dagger is from a meteorite, and not
Speaker 3: only that adds evidence about what kind of meteorite and
Speaker 3: so the author's right quote. Here we report non destructive
Speaker 3: two dimensional chemical analysis of the Tuton Common iron dagger
Speaker 3: conducted at the Egyptian Museum of Cairo. Elemental mapping of
Speaker 3: nickel on the dagger blade surface shows discontinuous banded arrangements
Speaker 3: in places with cubic symmetry and a bandwidth of about
Speaker 3: one millimeters, suggesting a Vidmin stotton pattern. Remember that, Yeah, ah, yeah,
Speaker 3: So the intermediate nickel content with the presence of the
Speaker 3: Vidmin stotton pattern implies the source meteorite of the dagger
Speaker 3: blade to be octahedrite. So again that's the octahedron the
Speaker 3: d eight die. Furthermore, they say that the quote randomly
Speaker 3: distributed sulfur rich black spots are likely remnants of troylite
Speaker 3: inclusions in iron meteorite. So remember those black spots I
Speaker 3: mentioned on the dagger that I said looked like lunar maria,
Speaker 3: You know, those strange kind of geographical looking depressions and
Speaker 3: dark spots. These authors conclude that those are probably sulfur
Speaker 3: rich troylite inclusions, little impurities in the original metal made
Speaker 3: of mineral iron sulfide and so iron sulfide.
Speaker 4: By the way, you.
Speaker 3: Ever boil a hard boiled egg too long and it
Speaker 3: ends up with a green cake forming around the yolk.
Speaker 3: That's iron sulfide. I think hydrogen sulfide in the egg
Speaker 3: white reacts with iron and the egg yolk and makes
Speaker 3: iron sulfide. So yeah, that's what that gross green stuff is.
Speaker 4: It's not gonna hurt you. You can still eat it.
Speaker 1: You are not a fan of green eggs.
Speaker 3: Well, no, I'm fine with a full green eggs. I
Speaker 3: don't love the green case around the yolk. I feel
Speaker 3: like you boiled that too long.
Speaker 4: That's a no, no, okay.
Speaker 1: I won't do any of the follow up questions about
Speaker 1: whether you would need it with a goat and so forth.
Speaker 4: I need anything with a goat.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: Goat's just good company that makes even unpalatable food.
Speaker 4: Fine, Yes, they are quite amusing anyway.
Speaker 3: The authors of the paper argue that the Vidmans dot
Speaker 3: and pattern and the Troy light inclusions, the fact that
Speaker 3: those were preserved, these things together indicate that the iron
Speaker 3: was probably forged and worked at low temperatures of less
Speaker 3: than nine hundred and fifty degrees celsius. They also even
Speaker 3: use material analysis to not just say, like what physically
Speaker 3: the stagger is, but to connect it to some historical documents.
Speaker 3: I don't think they were the first people to make
Speaker 3: this connection, but they used some material analysis to kind
Speaker 3: of back it up. So the authors here argued that
Speaker 3: this dagger was quite possibly a gift given to Tutenkommon's
Speaker 3: likely grandfather, Amenhotep the third, from the kingdom of Mitani
Speaker 3: in Anatolia, because there is a tablet mentioning such a
Speaker 3: gift among Egyptian records. There's a tablet that says, you know,
Speaker 3: they're they're sending a gift to Amenhotep the third and
Speaker 3: it's described as an iron dagger with a golden hilt.
Speaker 3: And then the bit of material evidence that backs this
Speaker 3: up is that there is lime plaster used to glue
Speaker 3: jim stones to the gold hilt, and that lime plaster
Speaker 3: glue is characteristic of Mitani craftsmanship rather than Egyptian, which
Speaker 3: tended to use gypsum plaster instead. So this dagger, wrapped
Speaker 3: up with the body of King Tut inside his wrappings
Speaker 3: laying on his thigh, seems to have been made out
Speaker 3: of metal that came from a meteorite, and it's a
Speaker 3: good guessed that this was a gift to King Tut's
Speaker 3: grandfather from Anatolia.
Speaker 1: Wow, now some of you are probably wondering, well, which
Speaker 1: god was in charge of all of this, So a
Speaker 1: brief sidebar here on this in general. For this I
Speaker 1: turned once more to Geraldine Pinch's book and Egyptian Mythology,
Speaker 1: and essentially we should probably point out, yeah, that the
Speaker 1: Egyptian god associated with metal working is the god Taw.
Speaker 1: And not only is Ta associated with metalworking, he's also
Speaker 1: held up as a kind of creator deity. And some
Speaker 1: of these traditions said to have designed and crafted the world,
Speaker 1: to have smelt the new lands, and I found this interesting.
Speaker 1: Made bodies for the kings of Egypt out of electrum, copper,
Speaker 1: and iron bodies according to Pinch, that were presumably made
Speaker 1: so that they could occupy those bodies in the lands
Speaker 1: beyond death, So this would be like your resurrected metal
Speaker 1: body for the next one world. He Ta here, though
Speaker 1: is often described as being beautiful of face. His skin
Speaker 1: is often described as being blue, though I've also seen
Speaker 1: it green in some depictions. He wears an artisan's cap,
Speaker 1: and he is associated with dwarves, perhaps to the to
Speaker 1: the fact that dwarves were often employed in gym working,
Speaker 1: and this on its own is a pretty fascinating topic.
Speaker 1: The role of dwarves in ancient Egypt. There are a
Speaker 1: few different papers on this. Some of these individuals worked
Speaker 1: in entertainment or as personal attendants. Others were animal tenders
Speaker 1: and indeed jewelers. But also there were individuals of the
Speaker 1: Old Kingdom who rose to high rank and status and
Speaker 1: were buried as such. And we're able, you know, to
Speaker 1: tell they had that status because of the way they
Speaker 1: were buried. So it's it's often argued that cultural acceptance
Speaker 1: was pretty high for them. And and Ta was ultimately
Speaker 1: just one of multiple gods held to have a dwarf
Speaker 1: in form of one sort or another. And Ta also
Speaker 1: would later be equated with Hephaestus by the Greeks, though
Speaker 1: of course Hephaestus was not beautiful of face, I think
Speaker 1: in most traditions.
Speaker 3: So meteorites have of course been found by people since prehistory,
Speaker 3: but how often did we actually understand what they were
Speaker 3: and where they came from. Just one example of people
Speaker 3: not generally accepting that meteorites came from outer space is
Speaker 3: European scientists up until the early nineteenth century. There's a
Speaker 3: good summary of this history of like the debate about
Speaker 3: the origin of meteorites in the book Cosmic Horizons, edited
Speaker 3: by Steven Soda and Neil deGrasse Tyson. I think it
Speaker 3: was published in the year two thousand and The short
Speaker 3: version of the story is that there have long been
Speaker 3: reports from people, you know, seeing fireballs in the sky
Speaker 3: or hearing explode, then finding rocks that they believed had
Speaker 3: fallen from above. But as of the late eighteenth century,
Speaker 3: most scientists of the European Enlightenment doubted that stones actually
Speaker 3: fell from the sky, or if they did believe it,
Speaker 3: they thought maybe that the stones, you know, came from
Speaker 3: somewhere on Earth. They couldn't have come from outer space.
Speaker 3: Maybe they were thrown from a distant volcano, or maybe
Speaker 3: they were picked up and tossed by a hurricane far away.
Speaker 3: Because at the time there was a sort of a dogma.
Speaker 3: There was a convention that space, apart from the planets
Speaker 3: and the comets, was empty. You know, you got the Earth,
Speaker 3: you got the Sun, the planets, the stars, the comets,
Speaker 3: but other than that, it's just empty out there. There's
Speaker 3: not like stuff flying around. However, a German physicist by
Speaker 3: the name of Ernst Kladney, who lived seventeen fifty six
Speaker 3: to eighteen twenty seven published a book in the year
Speaker 3: seventeen ninety four arguing that these reports were accurate and
Speaker 3: that rocks and pieces of iron actually do sometimes fall
Speaker 3: from the sky, in some cases creating fireballs and explosions
Speaker 3: as they are heated by friction traveling through the atmosphere.
Speaker 3: Cladney was an interesting guy. He was a lawyer by training,
Speaker 3: but he was also very into music and acoustics, and
Speaker 3: he discovered a way of visualizing sound waves by putting
Speaker 3: dust or powder on a plate and then vibrating the
Speaker 3: plate by rubbing it with a violin bow, and so
Speaker 3: the powder would range itself into these patterns that were
Speaker 3: related to the sound waves produced. Cladney went about collecting
Speaker 3: eyewitness reports of fireballs and meteorite falls from the sky,
Speaker 3: and he tried to evaluate them for credibility and see
Speaker 3: what could be learned from them, and eventually he concluded
Speaker 3: that yes, rocks really do fall from space. One thing
Speaker 3: he did was use descriptions of fireballs to estimate the
Speaker 3: speed at which these rocks were entering the Earth's atmosphere,
Speaker 3: and he realized they must be going much faster than
Speaker 3: could be accounted for by the Earth's gravity alone, so
Speaker 3: they're not simply falling, but they must be flying through
Speaker 3: space at extreme velocities. And this connected with the fact
Speaker 3: that when these alleged rocks were found, they looked scorched
Speaker 3: all over. The friction of entering the atmosphere at these
Speaker 3: high speeds melted their outer shells, and so he looked
Speaker 3: into it. He published this book in seventeen ninety four,
Speaker 3: and it was initially met with skepticism by his peers
Speaker 3: by European scientists, but many scientists updated their beliefs due
Speaker 3: to new emerging evidence. They sort of got lucky with
Speaker 3: some things, some documented events that really backed up his argument,
Speaker 3: including a widely reported meteor fall near Siena, Italy, just
Speaker 3: a couple of months after the book was published, another
Speaker 3: one in England which included an eyewitness account of a
Speaker 3: farmer who claimed a black rock hit the earth only
Speaker 3: thirty feet away from him and caused an explosion in
Speaker 3: the mud that splattered all over his body. And then
Speaker 3: there was another one in Normandy in eighteen oh three,
Speaker 3: which was extensively documented by the French physicist to Jean
Speaker 3: Baptiste bo which included reports of a fireball as well
Speaker 3: as an elliptical impact area that had many weird stones
Speaker 3: within it. And so these reports were supplemented by chemical
Speaker 3: and mineral analysis of some of these meteorite samples, and
Speaker 3: it turned out that these samples were unlike any rocks
Speaker 3: or metal ores known of on Earth. For example, the
Speaker 3: rocks contained what they called at the time globules. These
Speaker 3: are now known as chondrules, their little round grains within
Speaker 3: the structure of the rock that began as molten droplets
Speaker 3: of minerals in space, and then a crete together within asteroids.
Speaker 3: Also connecting to what we've already found, they discovered that
Speaker 3: iron meteorrite fragments contained levels of nickel that had never
Speaker 3: been obsor in Earth based iron. And then, finally another
Speaker 3: piece of evidence was the discovery of the first asteroid,
Speaker 3: the Dwarf Planet series in eighteen oh one, which suggested
Speaker 3: that space between the planets and the comets was not empty.
Speaker 3: There were lots of rocky things floating around out there,
Speaker 3: and some of them might occasionally land on Earth, and
Speaker 3: that was in fact what meteorites were. So it was
Speaker 3: more than one hundred years after Newton's principia that the
Speaker 3: true origin of meteorites was widely accepted among European scientists.
Speaker 3: But that brings me to an article that I wanted
Speaker 3: to talk about to address the question of what the
Speaker 3: ancient Egyptians knew. So I was reading an article in
Speaker 3: the anthropology magazine Sapiens written by an Egyptologist who named
Speaker 3: Victoria Almansa Vilatro. This is from twenty twenty three, and
Speaker 3: if Almansa Villatoro's argument is correct, the fact that meteorites
Speaker 3: come from space or from the sky was known to
Speaker 3: the ancient Egyptians. Just one cool example she mentions in
Speaker 3: the article is there's an interesting inscription in hieroglyphics inside
Speaker 3: the pyramid of Unus at Sakara. Unus was the last
Speaker 3: pharaoh of the Fifth Dynasty during Egypt's Old Kingdom, and
Speaker 3: he ruled in the middle of the twenty fourth century BCE,
Speaker 3: so like forty four hundred years ago, and the sentence
Speaker 3: from the pyramid text reads, Eunus the king seizes the
Speaker 3: sky and splits its iron. Now, this article in Sapiens
Speaker 3: is based somewhat on Almansa Villatorro's academic publication in the
Speaker 3: Journal of Egyptian Archaeology from twenty nineteen called the cultural
Speaker 3: Indexicality of the n forty one sign for beat this. Oh,
Speaker 3: this's got some strange characters. BJ three sort of is
Speaker 3: what it looks like the metal of the sky and
Speaker 3: the sky of metal. Now this includes a lot of
Speaker 3: linguistic arguments that are way over my head, but I
Speaker 3: was just going through to get the main point and
Speaker 3: pull out some details. And one of the things I
Speaker 3: wanted to get to I wanted to mention briefly just
Speaker 3: because I thought it was interesting before getting to remain
Speaker 3: conclusions or about the religious and ceremonial functions of iron.
Speaker 3: All Monts of Villaturo mentions in the paper that pre
Speaker 3: Iron Age iron artifacts are associated in Egypt with an
Speaker 3: elaborate funerary ritual known as the opening of the Mouth,
Speaker 3: which was a sort of ceremony performed over a dead body.
Speaker 3: I think often of a king or a ruler, but
Speaker 3: a ceremony over a body that seems to be sort
Speaker 3: of activated the powers of life beyond death. It's sort
Speaker 3: of like turning on afterlife mode to give you the
Speaker 3: powers of like eating and drinking and speaking in the afterlife.
Speaker 3: And I briefly got very interested in this. So this
Speaker 3: was not in the paper, but I went looking for
Speaker 3: a text of the spoken part of the opening of
Speaker 3: the mouth ceremony. I think there are a lot of
Speaker 3: different versions of this, but the one I found in
Speaker 3: particular was a translation of the ritual from the two
Speaker 3: Zoum Chapel of rech Mirah, which involved like dedicating a
Speaker 3: statue of the dead, and the text includes the following lines, Uh,
Speaker 3: there's a letter, a capital letter in here which just
Speaker 3: refers to the name of the dead. So when you
Speaker 3: hear in, you think of the name of the dead.
Speaker 3: It goes, I have balanced your mouth and bones for you.
Speaker 3: In I have opened your mouth for you. In I
Speaker 3: open your mouth for you with the new uplade. I
Speaker 3: have opened your mouth for you with the new uplade.
Speaker 3: The mesca hetch you blade of iron that opens the
Speaker 3: mouths of gods. Horace is the opener of the mouth
Speaker 3: of N.
Speaker 4: Horace.
Speaker 3: Horace has opened the mouth of N. Horace has opened
Speaker 3: the mouth of N with that which he opened the
Speaker 3: mouth of his father, with which he opened the mouth
Speaker 3: of Osiris, with the iron that came from Seth. The
Speaker 3: mesketch you blade of iron with which the mouths of
Speaker 3: gods are opened. May you open the mouth of N with.
Speaker 1: It nice and we get that connection back to Osiris,
Speaker 1: who we talked about previously on the show. This is
Speaker 1: interesting too because then when I was researching ta who
Speaker 1: I talked about earlier, the Egyptian god associated with the craftsmanship.
Speaker 1: There was also mention in Pinch's work about the opening
Speaker 1: of the mouth ceremony and elsewhere in the book she
Speaker 1: talks about the Horus connection and so forth. But it
Speaker 1: seems like Tad did have some sort of connection to
Speaker 1: this as well, and she mentions that it was used
Speaker 1: for mummies but also for sculptures, and maybe given his
Speaker 1: craftsmanship angle, he's more aligned with that end of it.
Speaker 1: I'm not entirely certain, but yeah, imbuing life into the sculpture,
Speaker 1: embodying it somehow, and like you said, perhaps turning on
Speaker 1: after life mode for the mummified body of an important person.
Speaker 3: But also very interesting that implements specifically of iron are
Speaker 3: associated with this ritual, that it has some kind of
Speaker 3: mythical or ritual potency here. So all months of Laturo
Speaker 3: in this article gets into the fact that before the
Speaker 3: widespread or large scale smelting of iron and iron working
Speaker 3: within Egypt, there are still these these iron artifacts that
Speaker 3: are thought to be made primarily of iron sourced from meteorites,
Speaker 3: and that they almost always again serve this more ceremonial
Speaker 3: or decorative function. They are either objects of kind of
Speaker 3: wealth and power and decoration, they symbolize status maybe or
Speaker 3: that they have this religious significance. But anyway, I wanted
Speaker 3: to come back to the core question of like, what
Speaker 3: is the evidence that the ancient Egyptians actually understood that
Speaker 3: this meteoritic iron or meteorite iron came from the sky.
Speaker 3: And so she writes in the second millennium BCE, the
Speaker 3: Egyptian word or phrase used to refer to iron was
Speaker 3: a phrase that literally can mean the metal of the
Speaker 3: sky or the iron of the sky, and there are
Speaker 3: early known Egyptian associations between iron and the sky. So
Speaker 3: you've got the pyramid pyramid text which are texts inscribed
Speaker 3: on the inner walls of the pyramids where the Egyptian
Speaker 3: kings and queens of the fifth to eighth dynasties of
Speaker 3: the Old Kingdom were buried. This would cover a period
Speaker 3: of like forty one hundred to forty four hundred years
Speaker 3: ago or so. These texts included incantations that would be
Speaker 3: recited by priests to guide the dead rulers into the afterlife,
Speaker 3: and the Pyramid texts describe a really interesting cosmology, really
Speaker 3: interesting picture of how the universe was shaped. And in
Speaker 3: her work, almnts of Llatro argues that the way they
Speaker 3: described the sky should be pictured as a giant iron
Speaker 3: bowl with water in it, and water can fall from
Speaker 3: the bowl. I guess that's rain, but also chunks of
Speaker 3: the iron bowl is self can fall to the earth,
Speaker 3: and these would be iron meteorites. Now the author admits
Speaker 3: that it's not obvious this is what's being described. You
Speaker 3: have to sort of decode a linked system of metaphors
Speaker 3: within the glyphs of the Egyptian language. She writes, quote,
Speaker 3: in the Pyramid texts, the word for iron is written
Speaker 3: with a hieroglyph that represents a hemispherical container of water.
Speaker 3: How the Egyptians perceived the sky. Iron and sky are
Speaker 3: interchangeable in the texts, which is why passages describe the
Speaker 3: dead saling the iron and the king needing to break
Speaker 3: an iron barrier to reach the sky. And then she
Speaker 3: documents how there are also links between the concept of
Speaker 3: iron and the concept of water, because remember, in many
Speaker 3: ancient cosmologies, people sort of believe the sky was in
Speaker 3: some sense full of water, and so maybe when it rains,
Speaker 3: that's water leaking out of the waters above. And so
Speaker 3: Almans of Vulatora writes that the goddess Newt personified the sky.
Speaker 3: But also at this period there are religious texts explaining
Speaker 3: the belief that in the afterlife a dead royal would
Speaker 3: return to the waters of Newts Uterus, and so this
Speaker 3: sign used for iron is also associated with the word
Speaker 3: for uterus and the word for well, like water well.
Speaker 3: And so she admits there might be legitimate reasons for
Speaker 3: doubting this interpretation that these associations mean that the Egyptians
Speaker 3: knew that iron meteorites came from the sky. And one
Speaker 3: is the simple question of, like, how likely is it
Speaker 3: in a given space and time period that someone would
Speaker 3: be able to like have the like witness a meteorite falling,
Speaker 3: which itself is a fairly rare event, witness it falling,
Speaker 3: and then have it be lucky enough that it lands
Speaker 3: very physically close that you can close enough that you
Speaker 3: can go find the physical meteorite and then associate it
Speaker 3: with the falling you saw from above, and put all
Speaker 3: that information together and then also pass it on for
Speaker 3: it to become general cultural knowledge. You know, that would
Speaker 3: take a sort of like a lucky confluence of events
Speaker 3: that themselves might be fairly rare, but you know, it
Speaker 3: happens often enough that there are records of other times
Speaker 3: in places where people did see something falling and then
Speaker 3: they claim to have found a stone or something. So
Speaker 3: it's certainly not impossible. And in the case of ancient Egypt,
Speaker 3: it seems like there's this linguistic and literary evidence that
Speaker 3: would help support that idea that people did have this
Speaker 3: cultural knowledge making a link between iron and the sky
Speaker 3: and the waters above.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, and then again perhaps throwing in the you know,
Speaker 1: the idea of the desert being an ideal place to
Speaker 1: spot them in the dark stone standing out against the
Speaker 1: lighter colored sand, and so forth. May come back to
Speaker 1: meteor hunting a little bit in subsequent episodes to explore
Speaker 1: this this aspect of everything a bit more.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: One more thing she knows that I think is interesting
Speaker 3: is this is not totally unique to the Egyptian language.
Speaker 3: She also notes that there is a similar sort of
Speaker 3: linguistic link in ancient Sumerian, which also characterizes iron as
Speaker 3: sort of the metal of the sky.
Speaker 1: Excellent, excellent. Well, in the next episode, I think we're
Speaker 1: going to get into some more examples. We're gonna we're
Speaker 1: gonna keep exploring the overall topic, but we'll also get
Speaker 1: into some other specific examples from other cultures. Well, we'll
Speaker 1: sort of ask some of the same questions of Chinese traditions.
Speaker 1: You know, did they know that this iron came from above?
Speaker 1: And what did that mean to them? And so forth. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of additional interesting angles to explore,
Speaker 1: and there are some other other examples and alleged examples
Speaker 1: of meteoric iron being used in artifacts that are related
Speaker 1: to to cultures that I didn't even know how to
Speaker 1: tradition of using such substances. So it'll be it'll be
Speaker 1: fascinating to continue to.
Speaker 4: Explore this, no doubt. I'm excited.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So in the meantime, if you have thoughts on
Speaker 1: this topic, if you if there are specific examples you
Speaker 1: want to get in there early and say yes, make
Speaker 1: sure you cover this, go ahead and hit us with it.
Speaker 1: You know, we're we're in we're still in research mode here,
Speaker 1: we're still writing up the notes. So you know there's
Speaker 1: time to get it in there, and if not, it's
Speaker 1: something we can discuss on our listener mail episodes. Our
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Speaker 3: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
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