Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This is
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb. We're out this week, so we're continuing some
Speaker 1: episodes from the vault here. This is going to be
Speaker 1: part two of our series on meteoric metal and alien iron.
Speaker 1: This originally published five nine, twenty twenty four. Let's jump
Speaker 1: right in.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3: And I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two
Speaker 3: in our series on human uses of metal from the Sky.
Speaker 3: If you haven't heard the first episode yet, you should
Speaker 3: go back and check that one out before you listen
Speaker 3: to this. But in that episode brief recap, we focused
Speaker 3: mostly on a specific artifact from the New Kingdom of Egypt,
Speaker 3: which was a dagger found wrapped up with the mummy
Speaker 3: of the pharaotutin Common, which had a blade made of iron.
Speaker 3: Now that might not sound remarkable, but this was a
Speaker 3: blade made of iron from an era before the large
Speaker 3: scale smelting of iron in Egypt. And the really cool
Speaker 3: thing about this knife and many other iron artifacts from
Speaker 3: before the regional iron age in Egypt is that they
Speaker 3: were probably created out of iron that came from a
Speaker 3: meteorite space metal. So we also discussed the history of
Speaker 3: knowledge that meteorites come from space, including the story of
Speaker 3: how European scientists came to generally agree on the cosmic
Speaker 3: origin of meteorite rocks only around the beginning of the
Speaker 3: nineteenth century or so, and then also some interesting evidence
Speaker 3: that the ancient Egyptians did actually know that iron meteorites
Speaker 3: came from space, for example the way they referred to
Speaker 3: iron as the iron of the sky or the metal
Speaker 3: of the sky, and some other linguistic clues, clues in
Speaker 3: the way the glyphs of the Hieroglyphic language are put together.
Speaker 3: And then there are also some other languages like Sumerian,
Speaker 3: which have long had similar associations between iron or certain
Speaker 3: types of iron and the sky. And so today we're
Speaker 3: back to talk about more examples of the use of
Speaker 3: metal from space in human artifacts in human technological history.
Speaker 1: That's right, and where we're going to go next. We're
Speaker 1: going to get back into the use of iron and
Speaker 1: meteoric iron in meteorites in Chinese tradition, Chinese history, and
Speaker 1: maybe just a little dash of Chinese mythology. I want
Speaker 1: to refer back to a write up on iron that
Speaker 1: appears in the seventy Great Inventions of the Ancient World
Speaker 1: by Brian and Fagan. With this particular bit by Paul Tikratic.
Speaker 1: Cratic sums up Chinese iron usage by pointing out that
Speaker 1: iron production in China began around ninth century BCE, perhaps
Speaker 1: introduced from the West, but also just as likely an
Speaker 1: independent invention, and that by the Han period to go
Speaker 1: to BCE, the Chinese quote incontestably led the world in
Speaker 1: iron technology and production. But of course, as with these
Speaker 1: other examples we've been looking at, we do have evidence
Speaker 1: of artifacts created with meteoric iron prior to this. Specifically
Speaker 1: it takes us back to the Sheng dynasty. This would
Speaker 1: have been around fourteen one hundred BCE. Now, as we
Speaker 1: previously mentioned, there of course has been some back and
Speaker 1: forth on the testing of various pre Iron Age iron artifacts,
Speaker 1: and ultimately a lot of that is still going on,
Speaker 1: and these blades are often mentioned in some of those documents.
Speaker 1: Now in that paper that I credited in the last
Speaker 1: episode from Albert Jambond, twenty seventeenth Bronze Age iron meteoretic
Speaker 1: or not a chemical strategy. At least according to this source,
Speaker 1: the nickel count is low in these examples, but not
Speaker 1: low enough to assign terrestrial origin, and that this is
Speaker 1: definitely a case it seems like where the lower nickel
Speaker 1: content is likely due to weathering effects. The blades themselves
Speaker 1: have long been discussed as probable examples of meteoric iron,
Speaker 1: going back at least as far as the book two
Speaker 1: Early Chinese bronz Weapons with Meteoritic Iron Blades by gettens
Speaker 1: at All in nineteen seventy one, which details that these
Speaker 1: blades were found in nineteen thirty one in Anyang, Hanan
Speaker 1: within a single tomb, which is also cited in Metals
Speaker 1: in Antiquity by Young at All nineteen ninety nine. Now
Speaker 1: I have a picture here of these artifacts here for
Speaker 1: you to look at, Joe and everyone else. You can
Speaker 1: look these up as well online. Just look for meteoric
Speaker 1: iron Chinese axes or Chinese broad axes and you can
Speaker 1: likely find images of this. You can tell that these
Speaker 1: were ornate, highly stylized weapons. Now, I want to note
Speaker 1: that both of these sources here that are talking about it,
Speaker 1: they seem to indicate less than certainty in some of
Speaker 1: the details, saying that there seems to be a lot
Speaker 1: of believe to have been in these references. Though to
Speaker 1: be clear, these weapons have long been in the Freer
Speaker 1: collection at the Smithsonian, and there's no indication that the
Speaker 1: dating or a larger geographic origin is particularly endowed here.
Speaker 1: I just couldn't help but pick up on the fact
Speaker 1: that this is one of those accounts where there seem
Speaker 1: to be a little bit of ambiguity but no real
Speaker 1: sticking points I think in trying to understand where these
Speaker 1: came from. These would have been Chinese broad axes, formally
Speaker 1: inlaid and again likely largely ceremonial. These are not weapons
Speaker 1: that would be out on the battlefield.
Speaker 3: Ah. Yeah, and I had been assuming the same was
Speaker 3: true of Tuton Commons iron dagger, though in fact I
Speaker 3: guess I don't have a way of knowing that for sure.
Speaker 3: Don't have a reason to suspect to use this for
Speaker 3: knife dueling or anything.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's interesting to think about these examples in terms
Speaker 1: of how do you use it right, because you know,
Speaker 1: we have cases where you're going to have some sort
Speaker 1: of an iron weapon that is going to be of
Speaker 1: exceptional quality, but you're going to have so few of them,
Speaker 1: maybe even just one. You know, what, what are you
Speaker 1: going to do during the Bronze period with your iron weapon.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like if, as a thought experiment, you
Speaker 1: were to say, okay, what if I were to take
Speaker 1: a lightsaber back to the Hundred Years War between England
Speaker 1: and France during the fourteenth and fifteenth century, and you
Speaker 1: gave it to one side or the other? You know,
Speaker 1: what good is it going to do? You know, you
Speaker 1: could make a case maybe for some sort of special
Speaker 1: forces style use of the weapon by either party. Okay,
Speaker 1: single combat, sure, but more likely than not, a single
Speaker 1: light saber is not going to decide anything during the
Speaker 1: fourteenth or fifteenth century in any kind of like warfare scenario.
Speaker 1: Would make far more sense as a ritual object, as
Speaker 1: a tool of propaganda, as is essentially like a scepter
Speaker 1: to show how special and or powerful you are.
Speaker 3: And as we talked about last time, with the specific
Speaker 3: case of iron versus the dominant metal of bronze, there's
Speaker 3: not even really a clear material superiority of early iron
Speaker 3: weapons over say, well made bronze ones of the period
Speaker 3: that the advantages of iron when moving into the iron age,
Speaker 3: were primarily advantages in terms of economics and the sourcing
Speaker 3: of materials, that it was easier to produce lots of
Speaker 3: iron implements and tools and weapons at scale, rather than
Speaker 3: it being that iron is just a much better metal
Speaker 3: or something right right.
Speaker 1: And the other key point, as we discussed in the
Speaker 1: last episode, is the knowledge of where the meteoric iron
Speaker 1: came from, like knowing that this weapon is, you know,
Speaker 1: of heavenly origin or of cosmic origin and so forth,
Speaker 1: that seems to often be really important. And so I'm
Speaker 1: going to get into that question here with Chinese examples.
Speaker 1: Turning first back to gettens at All the work to
Speaker 1: early Chinese bronze weapons with iron blades from seventy one.
Speaker 1: They point out that meteorite falls were known to the
Speaker 1: ancient Chinese and discussed in their literature, often in reference
Speaker 1: to portents. So if the metal used was known to
Speaker 1: have come from the sky, they contend, it would have
Speaker 1: added to the auspiciousness of the weapons and the reason
Speaker 1: that the iron was used in these cases instead of jade,
Speaker 1: which typically occupied an elevated position of ceremonial importance for
Speaker 1: weapons and so forth. Such usage may have also influenced
Speaker 1: known Chinese meteorite fragments. Quote such a use of meteoritic
Speaker 1: iron might also explain the fact that only one iron
Speaker 1: meteorite find is known from China. This I is referring
Speaker 1: to ancient examples of meteorite, the idea being that iron
Speaker 1: meteorites would have been known as a source for this
Speaker 1: sort of metal and would have been used as such.
Speaker 1: And certainly these are not the only known examples of
Speaker 1: Chinese meteoric weapons or weapons or artifacts that are believed
Speaker 1: or it's argued, may be made of such iron. There
Speaker 1: are several known artifacts of possible meteoric iron from the
Speaker 1: late Sheng and early Western Zo. So for examples of
Speaker 1: some of those observations, because they mentioned, okay, the ancient
Speaker 1: Chinese knew about meteorites. They knew they came from the sky.
Speaker 1: For some examples of this knowledge, I turned to the
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety four paper Meteorite Falls in China and some
Speaker 1: Related human Casualty Events by Yao at All, published in
Speaker 1: the journal Meteoritics. They looked at accounts from roughly seven
Speaker 1: hundred BCE through nineteen twenty CE, with the earliest account
Speaker 1: cited found in the Spring and Autumn Annals, traditionally attributed
Speaker 1: to Confucius, who would have historically lived around five fifty
Speaker 1: one through four to seventy nine BCE. This work is
Speaker 1: one of the five classics of ancient Chinese literature and
Speaker 1: it covers an historical period stretching from seven twenty two
Speaker 1: to for eighty one BCE, and the work includes coverage
Speaker 1: of a six forty five BCE event in which quote
Speaker 1: in translation of course, five stones fell in Sung And
Speaker 1: there are various other accounts in this article that they
Speaker 1: don't highlight all of them, but they highlight some of
Speaker 1: historic Note there is a Sei dynasty account. This is
Speaker 1: from the work History of the Suy Dynasty, and it
Speaker 1: refers to a six sixteen b CE meteorite, with the
Speaker 1: account depicting a meteorite hitting a siege tower during the
Speaker 1: besiegement of a walled city. What yeah, So the idea
Speaker 1: is that there's a you know, a siege situation going on,
Speaker 1: a meteorite hits, takes out the siege tower, causes the sea,
Speaker 1: and then either the strike of the meteorite or the
Speaker 1: perhaps far more likely the subsequent collapse of said siege
Speaker 1: tower results in I believe I read possibly ten fatalities.
Speaker 1: That was their I think recorded number. If this is true,
Speaker 1: it might stand as the earliest recorded human meteorite related fatality.
Speaker 1: These are of course rare. You're talking about situations where
Speaker 1: the you know, a meteorite hits somebody or hits the
Speaker 1: vicinity of a human and in doing so, results in
Speaker 1: a casualty. But it's also non entirely clear. I've read
Speaker 1: some criticism of this account saying, Okay, this is certainly possible.
Speaker 1: It would be a very rare occurrence. We also have
Speaker 1: to just acknowledge that it's possible that this siege tower
Speaker 1: was taken out by something far more mundane, like human
Speaker 1: munitions fired from the wall of the sieged city, that
Speaker 1: sort of thing. But it is kind of It is
Speaker 1: cataloged in the historic records, so I've seen numerous texts
Speaker 1: acknowledge it and say, well, perhaps this is true.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So hundreds of accounts follow these early accounts of meteorites
Speaker 1: and the Chinese records, and I'm not going to go
Speaker 1: through all of them, or even the ones listed in
Speaker 1: this source. But there's one more I wanted to mention
Speaker 1: here because it does line up with what we're talking
Speaker 1: about and the subject of meteors and iron, and that
Speaker 1: is the non meteorite shower of thirteen forty one. It's
Speaker 1: notable because it seems to have been a shower of
Speaker 1: iron meteorites, and it was even referred to as quote
Speaker 1: the iron rain, with descriptions of the resulting bore holes
Speaker 1: in the earth matching up with what we know of
Speaker 1: iron meteorite impacts today. Now. Thirteen forty one, of course,
Speaker 1: is far outside the Bronze Age examples we're looking at,
Speaker 1: but you know, you combine this with certainly these much
Speaker 1: earlier examples, and it does seem clear that the ancient
Speaker 1: Chinese knew that meteorites came from above, they came from
Speaker 1: the sky, and that alone would be enough to sort
Speaker 1: of factor into these myth making understandings of what a
Speaker 1: weapon forged of such iron would mean. By the way,
Speaker 1: speaking of Chinese mythology, it's worth noting that you the Great,
Speaker 1: the character that we've talked about on the show before,
Speaker 1: founder of the Shop of the dynasty, in myth and legend,
Speaker 1: the bringer of flood controls is sometimes, at least at
Speaker 1: least in early China, these mythology connected to meteorites. Oh so,
Speaker 1: according to Mark Edward Lewis in the Mythology of Early China,
Speaker 1: some texts say that you was born of a stone
Speaker 1: or in a place named for a stone, while other
Speaker 1: tellings state that quote his mother was inseminated by a
Speaker 1: magical stone or meteor.
Speaker 3: Oh. Interesting, this is a different way of sort of
Speaker 3: like a parenthood by the gods. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I had not run across this before. I
Speaker 1: cross checked it in a couple of my go to
Speaker 1: Chinese mythology sources Yang and in Turner's Chinese Mythology and
Speaker 1: Burrell's work on Chinese mythology. Both of these texts, I
Speaker 1: refer to an origin story for you by which he's
Speaker 1: born from the belly of his father's corpse following the
Speaker 1: said father's execution. And this I'm guessing this entirely masculine
Speaker 1: birth as a Buryl describes it. I guess this is
Speaker 1: the predominant origin story that comes later, and that Lewis
Speaker 1: here is focusing primarily on early tellings before those traditions emerged.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, I see so.
Speaker 1: Anyway, these uh, these axes among other artifacts, you know,
Speaker 1: another example of an ancient Bronze Age culture having access
Speaker 1: to meteoric iron, using it to craft weapons that then
Speaker 1: have an exalted place within their culture. Uh and so,
Speaker 1: and definitely look up images of this if you have
Speaker 1: the ability to do so readily, because you can you know,
Speaker 1: they're they're they're not in pristine form, they haven't been
Speaker 1: restored or anything like that. They're not anywhere near the
Speaker 1: the completeness of Tout and Commons dagger, but you can
Speaker 1: still get a sense of the majesty they would have had.
Speaker 3: Yeah, even the stubs are beautiful. Okay. I want to
Speaker 3: talk about a statue, specifically a metal sculpture allegedly from Tibet,
Speaker 3: sometimes called the Iron Man, referred to in a lot
Speaker 3: of media reports as the Iron Man or sometimes as
Speaker 3: the Space Buddha.
Speaker 1: Well, these both, these descriptions both take you somewhere, that's
Speaker 1: for sure.
Speaker 3: So this statue weighs about ten point six kilograms or
Speaker 3: about twenty three pounds, and is roughly twenty four centimeters
Speaker 3: or about nine and a half inches tall. It is
Speaker 3: made of iron, and it depicts a bearded male figure
Speaker 3: that is sometimes referred to as a Buddha, sometimes referred
Speaker 3: to as a God sometimes referred to as a man,
Speaker 3: but he is depicted wearing trousers, a sort of cape
Speaker 3: or cloak that's joined over his shoulders in a knot
Speaker 3: on his chest. He's wearing kind of almost kind of
Speaker 3: cloglike looking shoes with a split in the cuff at
Speaker 3: the bottom of the pant legs, and what looks to
Speaker 3: me kind of like scale armor over his mid section.
Speaker 3: And then on that scale armor there is the symbol
Speaker 3: of a swastika, which, remember, before it was appropriated by
Speaker 3: the German Nazi Party, that was around nineteen twenty, it
Speaker 3: was for centuries or even millennia, a traditional symbol with
Speaker 3: positive associations in a lot of different cultures and religions
Speaker 3: throughout the world, notably in Hinduism and Buddhism.
Speaker 1: That's right, and it still has that status in various
Speaker 1: Hindu and Buddhist traditions, though of course permanently ruined in
Speaker 1: the West by the appropriation of the Nazi Party.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so in the iron Man statue, the figure
Speaker 3: has a halo like disc behind his head and he
Speaker 3: is clutching a round egg shaped object in one hand.
Speaker 3: His legs are folded underneath. His body looks like he
Speaker 3: could be sitting cross legged or perhaps even dancing. But
Speaker 3: this whole thing is carved out of a solid piece
Speaker 3: of metal with a rough, unfinished base below the figure.
Speaker 3: So what is the deal with this weird metal statue. Well,
Speaker 3: there was a bunch of media about this statue way
Speaker 3: back in twenty twelve that was associated with the publication
Speaker 3: of a paper that was looking into its physical makeup
Speaker 3: and its origins. The paper was by Buckner at All,
Speaker 3: published in the journal Media Critics and Planetary Science again
Speaker 3: in twenty twelve, and it was called Buddha from Space,
Speaker 3: an ancient object of art made of a China iron
Speaker 3: metia write fragment. So I'm going to start with what
Speaker 3: was originally alleged by it, but keep in mind that
Speaker 3: some of the information I'm going to say at first
Speaker 3: is either not certain or almost certainly not true. The
Speaker 3: lead author of this paper, Elmer Buckner, is a geologist
Speaker 3: affiliated with the Planetology Institute at Stuttgart University, and so
Speaker 3: the authors of this paper were looking into the question
Speaker 3: of first of all, what this statue is made of,
Speaker 3: but also what does it depict and where did it
Speaker 3: come from? As to where it comes from, there again,
Speaker 3: is plenty of debate about this, but the story as
Speaker 3: received by the authors of the paper goes like this.
Speaker 3: In the years nineteen thirty eight and nineteen thirty nine,
Speaker 3: Adolf Hitler's SS sponsored a research and propaganda expedition to Tibet.
Speaker 3: This is kind of a famous, famous expedition about which
Speaker 3: there has been much sort of cultural legend. But this
Speaker 3: expedition was led by the German zoologist and explorer Ernst Schaffer.
Speaker 3: This expedition collected a lot of material for return to Germany.
Speaker 3: So they took a bunch of plant and animal samples,
Speaker 3: seeds and grains and plants, and they cataloged birds. There
Speaker 3: was ornithology missions and stuff like that. And it also
Speaker 3: took a lot of cultural artifacts, including, according to a
Speaker 3: Triple As blog post about this paper by Stephen A.
Speaker 3: Edwards quote, a robe believed to have been worn by
Speaker 3: the Dali Lama, a gold coin, and the iron statue.
Speaker 3: The latter apparently attracted the attention of the Nazis because
Speaker 3: of a swastika carved into its center. So that's the
Speaker 3: story about where it came from. What does appear to
Speaker 3: be true is that the statue was in the possession
Speaker 3: of a private collector from some time unknown until the
Speaker 3: year two thousand and seven, which is the same year
Speaker 3: these authors began investigating it. But before then. The allegation
Speaker 3: is that it was taken from Tibet by Schaffer's men
Speaker 3: in the late thirties and then disappeared during World War II,
Speaker 3: only to reappear to the public in the two thousands.
Speaker 3: All right, now, as to the question of what the
Speaker 3: statue is made of, the authors conducted an elemental analysis
Speaker 3: and found that the concentration of elements present in the
Speaker 3: metal was consistent with an iron meteorite, so much like
Speaker 3: the analysis we talked about in the previous episode looking
Speaker 3: at King Tut's dagger. Here they found high concentrations of nickel.
Speaker 3: This statue was approximately sixteen percent nickel by weight and
Speaker 3: about zero point six percent cobalt, and these are not
Speaker 3: ratios you would expect to find in earth based iron.
Speaker 3: Earth based iron extracted from before the eighteen hundreds tends
Speaker 3: to be not more than about four percent nickel. Also,
Speaker 3: the authors analyzed the ratios of trace platinum group metals
Speaker 3: and found that these were also consistent with meteorite iron.
Speaker 3: Not only that they were able to match this metal
Speaker 3: to the composition of meteorites from a specific known impact area.
Speaker 3: They write, quote, the geochemical data of the meteorite generally
Speaker 3: matched the element values known from fragments of the Chinga
Speaker 3: atax site taxite meaning ungrouped iron meteorite strewn field, discovered
Speaker 3: in nineteen thirteen. The provenance of the meteorite, as well
Speaker 3: as the piece of art strongly points to the border
Speaker 3: region of eastern Siberia and Mongolia. Accordingly, and I went
Speaker 3: and did a little more looking, So it seems that
Speaker 3: the Chinga meteorite is sort of it's an area rather
Speaker 3: than one specific object. The Chinga meteorite field is something
Speaker 3: that contains fragments of meteorite found by gold miners in Tuva,
Speaker 3: which is a region of southern Siberia in Russia near
Speaker 3: the border with Mongolia, and the hundreds of meteorite fragments
Speaker 3: found there are thought to result from an object that
Speaker 3: exploded in the atmosphere over Tuva between ten and twenty
Speaker 3: thousand years ago. So the scientific evidence that the iron
Speaker 3: Man statue was made out of meteorite iron seems quite strong.
Speaker 3: But what about these other questions? What does this statue
Speaker 3: depict and when was a when and where was it made?
Speaker 3: Here's where we start getting into the much more disputed territory.
Speaker 3: The authors of this twenty twelve paper claimed that it
Speaker 3: was likely a depiction of the warrior king, god and
Speaker 3: wealth Buddha known as Viceravanna, who is the guardian of
Speaker 3: the North. There you can think of sort of heavenly
Speaker 3: beings that are guardians of the cardinal directions, and Viceravanna
Speaker 3: is the guardian of the North. This figure, Viceravanna, shares
Speaker 3: characteristics with the Hindu deity known as Kubera and is
Speaker 3: also known as Jambala, sometimes shown carrying a lemon or
Speaker 3: a money bag in his hand, and in other depictions,
Speaker 3: especially earlier ones, the authors say that Viceravana is shown
Speaker 3: as quote, a corpulent figure that holds a mongoose which
Speaker 3: spews jewels from its mouth. Sometimes also, especially beginning in
Speaker 3: the second half of the eighth century, they say he
Speaker 3: is shown with ghosts at his feet. So, due to
Speaker 3: a number of visual motifs such as the crossed legs
Speaker 3: and the scale armor and so forth, the authors believe
Speaker 3: that this is Viceravana we're looking at. But they also
Speaker 3: write their thoughts about the religious significance of the swastika
Speaker 3: in the image. They say, quote, the swastika prominently displayed
Speaker 3: on the cuirass of the sculpture was a symbol frequently
Speaker 3: used by the nature based pre Buddhist Bun religion rooted
Speaker 3: in the western parts of Tibet. The Bun religion had
Speaker 3: its own literature and art that was, they say, continuously
Speaker 3: absorbed into the Tibetan Buddhism that propagated into the entire
Speaker 3: area of Buddhist influence. A paper I'm going to talk
Speaker 3: about in a minute I think will somewhat dispute that claim.
Speaker 3: But they say, accordingly, the iron man could represent a
Speaker 3: Bun slash Buddhist hybrid, showing some recognition features of Kubera
Speaker 3: the early Viceravana.
Speaker 1: Good, all right, and not getting into the criticism I
Speaker 1: was about to come, that would seemingly make sense. We
Speaker 1: can point in various examples not only in Buddhist traditions,
Speaker 1: but in other traditions where we see these emerging of
Speaker 1: art styles and merging of cultures in a particular sculpture
Speaker 1: or other work.
Speaker 3: Sure, and so going with this hybrid art hypothesis, they
Speaker 3: write quote. According to this interpretation, the possible provenance of
Speaker 3: the Iron Man is Western Tibet or anywhere in the
Speaker 3: area of Buddhist influence, and the age can be tentatively
Speaker 3: dated at the eighth to tenth century. Now, as far
Speaker 3: as I can tell, the chemical analysis that they did
Speaker 3: appears sound. I've not come across major criticism of the
Speaker 3: analysis of the materials. So the statue is probably made
Speaker 3: of meteorite iron, perhaps even from the known source, the
Speaker 3: Chinga metiorite field, but the question of its cultural origin
Speaker 3: I found to be strongly disputed. So there is a
Speaker 3: professor of Buddhist studies named Akim Beher that could be
Speaker 3: Beyer or Bayer. I'm not sure. I'm going to say Beyer.
Speaker 3: Apologies if that's wrong. Beher, who was at one point
Speaker 3: affiliated with Dunguk University in Seoul, South Korea. He may
Speaker 3: be at a different institution. Now addressed these claims in
Speaker 3: an article that I found called the Lama Wearing Trousers
Speaker 3: Notes on an iron statue in a German private collection.
Speaker 3: And here's where the story I think becomes even more interesting, because,
Speaker 3: of course, any statue or sculpture made out of a meteorite.
Speaker 3: That's inherently a pretty fascinating idea, but it goes beyond
Speaker 3: that because it calls up questions of the authenticity of
Speaker 3: art and our ability to recognize what we're looking at
Speaker 3: when we're looking for cultural authentics and forgeries and fakes.
Speaker 3: In this place, pa Bear does not dispute the meteorite
Speaker 3: origin of the iron, but argues that the statue is
Speaker 3: not authentically Tibetan or Mongolian, and Bear's clear and well
Speaker 3: known hallmarks of European imitations of Tibetan art. In other words,
Speaker 3: instead of being a eight to tenth century Tibetan religious
Speaker 3: sculpture made out of iron from space, it is a
Speaker 3: modern European forgery made out of iron from space. Or
Speaker 3: perhaps not forgery, perhaps just imitation. I guess to decipher
Speaker 3: the difference between forgery and imitation, maybe you would need
Speaker 3: to know the intent of the artist.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I would imagine so. But as we've been saying,
Speaker 1: that that would appear to be lost to history. So
Speaker 1: all we can do is offer conjecture.
Speaker 3: So Behar says that at the time of his writing,
Speaker 3: in response to this paper and the media that followed it,
Speaker 3: no authority on Tibetan or Mongolian art had ever publicly
Speaker 3: authenticated the sculpture. So basically, from his point of view,
Speaker 3: I think he's saying like, there's not even really anybody
Speaker 3: within the relevant field to disagree with about this. It's
Speaker 3: just clearly not authentic. And he goes on to list
Speaker 3: thirteen stylistic elements of the sculpture that make it overwhelmingly
Speaker 3: clear to him that it is a fake. I'm not
Speaker 3: going to go through all thirteen, but I wanted to
Speaker 3: mention a couple in detail, and then I can just
Speaker 3: allude to the rest. So one example that even looked
Speaker 3: weird to me. I am not claiming to be an
Speaker 3: expert on the Tibetan or Buddhist art. I don't really
Speaker 3: know anything about it. But I looked at the statue
Speaker 3: and I was like, huh, the shoes look weird, and
Speaker 3: what do you know? So he identifies as this very
Speaker 3: first item on the list, the footwear. He writes, quote,
Speaker 3: the lama is neither barefoot, nor does he wear traditional boots.
Speaker 3: The shoes cover the feet like European shoes up to
Speaker 3: the ankles, and no further, and Rob, I've got a
Speaker 3: zoom in for us to look at here of the
Speaker 3: shoes on the image. Again, they do look weird to me.
Speaker 3: I'm not saying what looks weird to me should be
Speaker 3: decisive on this issue. I just thought it was funny
Speaker 3: that they did look weird to me. So after I
Speaker 3: read this comment by Bear, I went around looking for
Speaker 3: other images of Vice Ravanna in Buddhist art and other
Speaker 3: images of just figures from Tibetan art. And yeah, I
Speaker 3: don't really see shoes that look like this. I either
Speaker 3: see like bear feed or boots that go up the calf.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I had a similar experience after I read this
Speaker 1: in your notes. I have a copy of Roberty Fisher's
Speaker 1: Art of Tibet that I've used in research projects before,
Speaker 1: so I got that out I started looking through it.
Speaker 1: That book, by the way, does not cover this particular
Speaker 1: statue or mention it as far as I could tell,
Speaker 1: but it has a lot of illustrations. So I scanned
Speaker 1: through it, and I don't know, I had an odd experience,
Speaker 1: Like I love looking at Tibetan art. I love the
Speaker 1: complexity and all the rich information that is contained within
Speaker 1: some you know that becomes apparent to someone like me,
Speaker 1: but a lot of it is just lost on me
Speaker 1: as I am not its historic contended viewer, but it
Speaker 1: is almost I found it almost physically painful to look
Speaker 1: at each of these amazing images and focus not on
Speaker 1: anything else going on in them, but to look at
Speaker 1: the feet and the shoes. There are some images where
Speaker 1: feet are seemingly very important, and so it's not like
Speaker 1: feet or just a non commodity in these images, but
Speaker 1: there's just so much going on that I had a
Speaker 1: hard time looking at just the feet.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there was some series we did a while back
Speaker 3: where we talked about, you know, and there's variation within
Speaker 3: all art styles, but we talked about how a lot
Speaker 3: of Tibetan art is just gloriously busy. There's like so
Speaker 3: much going on in it and so much text here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it is if memory serves from those past episodes.
Speaker 1: Like part of it comes down to, of course, you
Speaker 1: have a very complex theology that needs to be related
Speaker 1: to some degree through these visual representations. And then also
Speaker 1: there's a strong case to be made that the landscape
Speaker 1: plays into it, that there is a kind of scale
Speaker 1: to the Tibetan landscape that therefore makes these interior holy
Speaker 1: spaces need to be busier, need to be just just
Speaker 1: so full of additional details, and without any of these,
Speaker 1: you know, artistic voids that become important in other traditions.
Speaker 1: But anyway, I looked at a lot of feet in
Speaker 1: these when I could see them, and because it seemed
Speaker 1: like most of the examples just broadly feet on all art,
Speaker 1: you know, it's either going to be a barefoot or
Speaker 1: it is going to be a feet you cannot see
Speaker 1: because they are obscured by clothing. And in fact, I
Speaker 1: don't think I saw a single shoe in that particular book.
Speaker 1: I also went to a rather prolific blog online of
Speaker 1: Himalayan Buddhis art titled It's you can find It's Himalayan
Speaker 1: Buddhist Art dot WordPress dot com. A lot of images
Speaker 1: on there, with some some write ups. It seems to
Speaker 1: be a very current blog. I looked around on there,
Speaker 1: and in fact, and there I found I found lots
Speaker 1: of bear feet, and I did find at least one
Speaker 1: example of a couple of examples maybe a footwear, one
Speaker 1: of which though is clearly, like you said, a boot
Speaker 1: that goes you know, much much farther up the leg
Speaker 1: as opposed to what we see in the alleged Ironman here.
Speaker 3: M hm.
Speaker 1: And so like you, now, when I look at the
Speaker 1: iron Man's feet, I'm like, this is this feels off?
Speaker 1: Like it feels even more off now that I have
Speaker 1: all this additional information in my head about it. They
Speaker 1: you know, they look like, I don't know, kind of
Speaker 1: like little elfin shoes.
Speaker 3: I don't know exactly. Yeah, but again, it's not just
Speaker 3: our opinion. Expert on on Buddhism and Tibetan art says,
Speaker 3: this is not what this usually looks like. Bear's next
Speaker 3: point points out the pants. This guy's wearing pants, and
Speaker 3: he says, this is sort of a dead giveaway that
Speaker 3: the trousers worn by the lama in this sculpture are
Speaker 3: to be found nowhere else in Tibetan nor Mongolian sculpture
Speaker 3: of the time, in which figures may wear robes or
Speaker 3: might have armor covering their shins, but never pants like this.
Speaker 3: And even there's kind of this interesting like what would
Speaker 3: you call this a flare or I guess like a split.
Speaker 3: There's like a split in the pant leg down at
Speaker 3: the cuff. And yeah, Bear is like, I don't know
Speaker 3: what to make of that. Maybe that's just to make
Speaker 3: it look sort of different than normal pants, like pastoral
Speaker 3: or something. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, most of these images you look at Yeah, you're
Speaker 1: looking at it flowing robes and so forth, or armor. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was looking around too for examples of what we
Speaker 1: might describe as pants, and I was not finding them.
Speaker 3: So then Bear goes on the list eleven other points
Speaker 3: of difference from known Tibetan nor Mongolian art, having to
Speaker 3: do with everything from the way the body is positioned,
Speaker 3: like the position of the legs, to how body parts
Speaker 3: such as the beard and the hands are rendered. There
Speaker 3: are major differences there. How the halo is depicted. I
Speaker 3: want to come right back to that, and then things
Speaker 3: about the clothing and the jewelry. Just a lot of
Speaker 3: stuff about this does not fit with the alleged context
Speaker 3: it supposedly comes from. So the part about the halo
Speaker 3: was also interesting to me, given that we did a
Speaker 3: series of episodes on halo imagery a couple of years ago.
Speaker 3: Bayer says that halo's attached to the body like I
Speaker 3: actually attached to the body on the sculpture are not
Speaker 3: very common in genuine metal statues here. If they have
Speaker 3: a halo it tends to be like a separate piece
Speaker 3: from the body in the sculpture, but then also notes
Speaker 3: that the halo around the figure's head and then the
Speaker 3: greater ariole behind the figure's body are totally blank and
Speaker 3: featureless circles. Here, I did a little digging deeper on this,
Speaker 3: and I found another paper zooming in and show maybe
Speaker 3: there are a few little scratches in the halo if
Speaker 3: you zoom in, but there's no major decoration or adornment.
Speaker 3: And if you compare this to how halo's or arioles,
Speaker 3: you know, the glow around the head or the glow
Speaker 3: around the body, how they're usually depicted in Tibetan or
Speaker 3: Buddhist art, it's a world of difference. They are usually
Speaker 3: not a blank circle. They are usually highly textured, highly adorned,
Speaker 3: like we were saying, very busy, with a lot going
Speaker 3: in them, maybe depicted as flames or having a kind
Speaker 3: of texture within them, or or showing even little like
Speaker 3: scenes and figures inside them.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think this feels like a strong point. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that this halo feels way too casual. Yeah, and probably
Speaker 1: has more in common with Western depictions of a halo,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, looks more like a halo you'd see around the
Speaker 3: head of a saint in like a medieval Catholic depiction
Speaker 3: or something. Yeah. Yeah, So there is a bunch of
Speaker 3: stuff like this that just does not match the cultural
Speaker 3: con text of its alleged production and on the art elements,
Speaker 3: Behar says, quote, my own research has not yielded a
Speaker 3: single even remotely similar object, which led me to conclude
Speaker 3: that the statue is in fact a European counterfeit, and
Speaker 3: I was encouraged to take this conclusion by several colleagues
Speaker 3: I contacted. While no such artifacts exist in Inner Asia,
Speaker 3: artifacts of the pseudo Tibetan style exist in abundance, produced
Speaker 3: as home decoration for film sets and the like. Any
Speaker 3: highly improbable claim to the opposite would have to carry
Speaker 3: the burden of proof. So having made the case that
Speaker 3: this is a European imitation rather than a genuine Tibetan
Speaker 3: or Mongolian original, the paper also addresses some other questions,
Speaker 3: including who is depicted in the sculpture and where it
Speaker 3: comes from. As to who is depicted, Bear agrees actually
Speaker 3: that it might possibly be Vice Shravana, which is what
Speaker 3: the original authors proposed, but then also give some other possibilities.
Speaker 3: Maybe it is pod Maasimbava was another figure. It could
Speaker 3: be an amalgam of elements from different original figures. And
Speaker 3: then there's the question of where did it come from.
Speaker 3: Behar also here casts doubt on the story that this
Speaker 3: was taken from Tibet by the Nazi Schaffer expedition in
Speaker 3: the late thirties. He claims that after corresponding with the
Speaker 3: authors of the twenty twelve study, he could find no
Speaker 3: reliable evidence that this piece had any historical association with
Speaker 3: Schaffer or with the SS. I could be wrong, but
Speaker 3: as best I can tell, the evidence for the association
Speaker 3: is the claim of the collector who produced it in
Speaker 3: the two thousands, But that came with no like historical
Speaker 3: evidence backing it up or no reliable documentation. So Behyar
Speaker 3: doubts the Schaffer connection totally.
Speaker 1: So this might have just been a story that was
Speaker 1: perhaps just to make it a little more marketable.
Speaker 3: To collectors possibly and that could in fact work in
Speaker 3: two different ways. He identifies two different hypotheses for the
Speaker 3: production of this. One is that it's a He calls
Speaker 3: it something produced for the quote general antique and curio market,
Speaker 3: in which case, the swastika depicted on the armor and
Speaker 3: the association with the Chaffer expedition would just like sort
Speaker 3: of give it more general mystery to be like, wow,
Speaker 3: that's weird and be attractive to a general antique buying
Speaker 3: audience or curio buying audience. But then he says, there's
Speaker 3: another interpretation which is a little more sinister, which is
Speaker 3: that it is made specifically to appeal to the market
Speaker 3: for Nazi memorabilia, in which case these associations would would
Speaker 3: have a specific direct appeal. So who did make it,
Speaker 3: Beyer says, we don't know, but he thinks that most
Speaker 3: likely it was made by a European artist sometime roughly
Speaker 3: between nineteen ten and nineteen seventy. Why those dates, The
Speaker 3: reasoning seems to be that this would be a period
Speaker 3: when there was a market for this sort of thing,
Speaker 3: for artifacts imitating Tibetan styles or things to be passed
Speaker 3: off as Tibetan in origin. But there was also still
Speaker 3: before nineteen seventy enough ignorance within the market for this
Speaker 3: sort of art that something of this quality could be
Speaker 3: passed off as authentic. He says, after around nineteen seventy
Speaker 3: quote more details of original Tibetan art gained wide dissipation,
Speaker 3: so probably the market would be more aware of like
Speaker 3: that this would not pass muster. So from Bear's perspective,
Speaker 3: we don't know what happened for sure, but it seems
Speaker 3: possible that it was something like a piece of meteorite
Speaker 3: iron from the Chinga meteorite field in Tuva again that
Speaker 3: southern Siberia somehow gets transported to Germany, where sometime in
Speaker 3: the twentieth century, maybe between like nineteen ten and nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy roughly, it is partially forged and carved into a
Speaker 3: statue made to crudely imitate Tibetan art, and then from
Speaker 3: there it passes into a collector's market with this story
Speaker 3: behind it, with this alleged link to the Shaffer expedition.
Speaker 3: And then he wraps up the article by sort of
Speaker 3: discussing the importance of consulting people in the relevant fields
Speaker 3: before go before you know, going public with claims of authenticity.
Speaker 3: So of course I'm you know, I'm not qualified to
Speaker 3: adjudicate this matter either, but I would tend to take
Speaker 3: the word of people who specialize in Tibetan art in
Speaker 3: evaluating whether something is authentically Tibetan art or not. And
Speaker 3: he says, basically, any specialist in Tibetan or Buddhist art
Speaker 3: could have looked at this and said this is not authentic.
Speaker 3: And it's still an interesting story with that additional context
Speaker 3: as well, because so like a European forgery of Buddhist
Speaker 3: art imbued with a mysterious Nazi backstory which is in
Speaker 3: fact made out of iron from a Siberian meteorite. How
Speaker 3: does that happen?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's still this enigma, isn't it, even if it's
Speaker 1: not the enigma that some tellings would make it out
Speaker 1: to be.
Speaker 3: But that's not all. There is one more development in
Speaker 3: this story that I came across. So in the year
Speaker 3: twenty seventeen, a German historian of Tibet named Israun Engelhart
Speaker 3: published an article called the Strange Case of the Buddha
Speaker 3: from Space. And in this piece, Engelhart gives extensive reasons,
Speaker 3: first of all, for thinking the sculpture was not brought
Speaker 3: back to Germany from Tibet by the expedition in the
Speaker 3: late nineteen thirties, which that expedition she had actually studied
Speaker 3: in great depth. For one thing, the members of the
Speaker 3: SS expedition actually made meticulous catalogs of the items, but
Speaker 3: they brought back from Tibet, and the iron statue is
Speaker 3: not listed among them. But Engelhart in this paper also
Speaker 3: documents her attempts to track down the ownership history of
Speaker 3: the Iron Man, and these efforts are somewhat successful, and
Speaker 3: they end up pointing her back to a sort of
Speaker 3: aggressively negotiating antiquities dealer from Russia. Going off that information,
Speaker 3: Engelhart eventually reaches the conclusion that the sculpture was probably
Speaker 3: somehow associated with a known historical figure. That it was
Speaker 3: probably associated with and perhaps made for the strange Russian
Speaker 3: artist Nikolai Rarick that spelled Roe rh Nikolai Rarik, who
Speaker 3: lived from eighteen seventy four to nineteen forty seven. Rareck
Speaker 3: in his career traveled extensively in Central Asia and was
Speaker 3: obsessed with the Himalayas and with Tibet, and there are
Speaker 3: many portraits of him posed in Tibetan garb and with
Speaker 3: Tibetan surroundings. He's wearing Tibetan robes. In nineteen twenty six,
Speaker 3: Eric produced a sketch that angle heart came across and
Speaker 3: the sketch is entitled the Order of Riggdan Yeppo, and
Speaker 3: the sketch really looks a lot like the iron Man statue.
Speaker 3: There's a similar posture and pose, a similar double halo,
Speaker 3: similar pointed hat, similar clothing, and a note about the
Speaker 3: title there that Rarick understood rigged and Yeppo as the
Speaker 3: name of a figure meant to be the future ruler
Speaker 3: of a spiritual kingdom known as Shambala in Tibetan Buddhism.
Speaker 3: And further writing about the comparisons between the iron Man
Speaker 3: statue and the sketch and eventually the painting produced by
Speaker 3: Rarick known as the Order of Riggdan Yeppo, Angle Heart writes, quote,
Speaker 3: the left hand of both the sketch and the statue
Speaker 3: seems to hold neither a mongoose nor a vase, but
Speaker 3: rather the famous radiant Centimani Stone, the wish fulfilling jewel
Speaker 3: coming from the Sky, which Rareck painted several times. In
Speaker 3: nineteen twenty three, when the Rarecks were in Paris, they
Speaker 3: received a mysterious package through dubious channels that allegedly contained
Speaker 3: this very stone, said to be a fragment of a
Speaker 3: meteorite and apparently Rareck and his wife Elena, who Elena
Speaker 3: was very into the mystical religious movement then known as Theosophy.
Speaker 3: They got really excited about the meteorite stone and believed
Speaker 3: it have great significance for their lives. Apparently Rareck had
Speaker 3: long had thoughts like imagined himself as carrying around a
Speaker 3: magic stone that had some kind of like potency and
Speaker 3: meaning for his fate. But anyway, motivated in part by
Speaker 3: their theosophical beliefs, Nikolai and Elena attempted to lead an
Speaker 3: expedition in the nineteen twenties to find Shambala in Tibet,
Speaker 3: to find the entrance to Shambala, and not only that,
Speaker 3: but Nikolai would eventually come to see himself and to
Speaker 3: style himself as Rigg Danneppo, the King of Shambala, and
Speaker 3: so he had like ceremonial robes and other trappings of
Speaker 3: this station created befitting his kingly destiny. Apparently, his claim
Speaker 3: to be the King of Shambala did not go over
Speaker 3: amazingly well with the Tibetans, and ultimately the expedition was
Speaker 3: considered a failure. Rareck got incredibly mad at Tibet and
Speaker 3: at Buddhism after this and published a bunch of nasty
Speaker 3: things about them. But coming back to the statue, where
Speaker 3: did the statue come from? Engelhart argues, based on a
Speaker 3: number of clues, that it's quite likely that Rarick had
Speaker 3: this statue made out of meteorite iron around nineteen twenty
Speaker 3: six to nineteen twenty seven in order to represent himself
Speaker 3: as the king of Shambala, and that's why it bears
Speaker 3: these similarities to the sketch and the painting that he
Speaker 3: did of himself in this posture. And this would have
Speaker 3: probably been done by a metal worker somewhere in Urga,
Speaker 3: the capital of Mongolia today known as Ulaanbatar, and this
Speaker 3: would have been while the Rareks were staying there in
Speaker 3: preparation for their expedition Tibet. So I think we would
Speaker 3: need more like physical evidence to make the link for sure,
Speaker 3: But I think it's good detective work, and Englehart makes
Speaker 3: a really strong case, circumstantial case based on the similarities
Speaker 3: of the artworks and themes that we know that Rarik
Speaker 3: and Rarek and his family were very interested in. So
Speaker 3: it seems quite plausible to me. Anyway. I think that'll
Speaker 3: do it for today's episode on the iron from space.
Speaker 3: But I feel like we've got more to talk about
Speaker 3: with this subject now, Rob, I think you've got an
Speaker 3: interview scheduled to run on Tuesday of next week, right,
Speaker 3: But can we come back with part three of this
Speaker 3: discussion on Thursday?
Speaker 1: Absolutely? Yeah. We have more examples of potential meteoric iron
Speaker 1: artifacts to discuss and more related topics. So we'll come
Speaker 1: back for a part three on Thursday with an interview
Speaker 1: episode airing on Tuesday that's not related.
Speaker 3: To this topic. Sounds great, can't wait.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, certainly? Right in? If you have thoughts
Speaker 1: on the alleged iron Man, well, I mean, I guess
Speaker 1: the iron part is not alleged. He's it's a man.
Speaker 1: He's made out of iron. He is iron Man. No,
Speaker 1: we can doubt that. We can't take that away from him.
Speaker 1: But if you have thoughts on that, or if you
Speaker 1: have thoughts on Chinese artifacts in Chinese mythology right in,
Speaker 1: we'd love to hear from you. Also, if there are
Speaker 1: other examples from other cultures that we haven't covered so far,
Speaker 1: bring them up, because we do have a few things
Speaker 1: lined up to discuss. But if you get us in time,
Speaker 1: you might be we might be able to add it
Speaker 1: to the list, or if it comes in after the fact,
Speaker 1: perhaps it's something we can discuss on our listener Mail episodes.
Speaker 1: Our listener Mail episodes publish on Mondays, and the Stuff
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Speaker 1: a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
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