When archaeologists peered inside Tutankhamun’s tomb a few weeks after its discovery on Nov. 4, 1922, they found antechambers packed to the brim with thousands of artifacts: statues, furniture, jewelry, clothes, chariots, paintings. Among these possessions was an iron dagger — just over one foot in length and crafted from an iron meteorite.
The cosmic source of the iron in the late pharaoh’s dagger was confirmed when a team of Italian researchers analyzed its elemental composition for the first time in 2016. While Earth-based iron contains about 4 percent nickel, the team found that the blade’s higher nickel concentration (and trace amounts of cobalt) was instead consistent with space rock.
Four years later, aided by the Grand Egyptian Museum’s conservation center, Takafumi Matsui, director of the Chiba Institute of Technology’s Planetary Exploration Research Center in Japan, and his colleagues used a portable scanning X-ray fluorescence instrument to map out the elements on the surface of the blade. They found not just iron, nickel, and cobalt, but also chlorine and manganese, among others. They also found that the bumpy, black spots along its edges and center likely originated from troilite — a mineral commonly found in iron meteorites. Further research released in 2022 investigated the how and where the blade was forged after its raw materials fell to Earth.
