A famous dagger found in the wrapping of Egyptian King Tutankhamun's mummy was made with iron from a meteorite...

This sort of thing is really cool and is where the idea of legendary weapons kind of comes from. It is literally made from material from heaven.

But yeah, its a bronze age item, they used Meteoric Iron because it was the only kind of Iron they could work.

Meteoric iron's certainly better than no iron at all, user.

All things are relative, too. Bronze itself isn't bad. Its leagues ahead of stone. It just isn't steel.

Well yeah, that's what I'm saying. If it weren't better than bronze, they wouldn't have bothered. I suppose there's something to be said for the novelty of a meteor iron tool, but probably most meteoric iron wasn't actually known to be from a meteor in those times.

Iron really isn't better than bronze. It's softer and worse at holding shape. It's also much cheaper (because bronze requires extensive trade) and when your knife fell out of the sky it's much cooler

Clarification: I'm talking about iron tools, not steel ones

>If it weren't better than bronze, they wouldn't have bothered.

Before they learned how to smelt iron, meteorites was the only available source of it, and as such the scarcity made it extremely luxurious. That the paharoah was buried with an iron knife does set the bar here.

So they would have bothered almost no matter what the mechanical properties where, even if it was only for purely ceremonial things. People have done it with gold.

As it is, I suspect the high-nickel iron was, well, acceptable compared to bronze.

Iron being cheap only comes into play when you start smelting iron ore. Meteoric iron isn't as abundant, and as such not as cheap.

Even shitty cast iron is a little bit harder than bronze, and even rudimentary steel is much harder and tougher. Additionally, iron and steel are lighter than bronze.

>Before they learned how to smelt iron, meteorites was the only available source of it, and as such the scarcity made it extremely luxurious. That the paharoah was buried with an iron knife does set the bar here.

Oh yes, absolutely. I'm just saying what made it cool to them was not that it came from a meteorite (which they probably wouldn't have been able to tell at the time), but that it was iron at all.

Though yeah, I suppose them not knowing WHY naturally occurring iron metal was rare doesn't mean that its rarity wasn't a major, perhaps the major factor in its perceived worth.

I like to imagine either he shanked a few uppity nobles with that thing because they believed it was some sort of magic or perhaps they used it in part during his whole 'Remove all the Wiggly Bits' ceremony.

Considering how Valuable or Magical they considered it? That shit could probably be the best to send off to the afterlife. Ya know, after all the fucking treasure in his tomb.

Isotope ratios and x-ray crystallography can spot meteoric iron by it's composition and crystalline metallic structures.

So, combine this with the curse of the tomb and here's what you get:

The meteor falls, bringing Something with it to Ancient Egypt. Since I'm a Lovecraft nerd, it's a Colour Out of Space.

Egyptian sorcerors bind the blighted creature to the metal of the rock it came from, the only anchor its foul nature seemed to accept. They break up the metal into daggers, plates, anything they can, believing it dismembers the "demon" they have bound in the metal.

When Tutakhamun dies, he is buried in obscurity, in a sealed and hidden tomb not to forget his lineage, but to ensure that the piece of the demon he is buried with can never be found and thus the beast can never be "reassembled" as Osiris was.

Which is a nice idea in theory. Eventually the fragment of Colour worms its way out of the metal but is still too weak to escape the tomb - until the explorers find it.

Now it is free, having blighted and slain those connected to the expedition as it searches for more fragments of itself.

YES

The demon can be killed with TERRY PRATCHETT'S SWORD.

Don't confuse cast iron (yes, a bit harder than bronze) and more likely to be found in late Bronze - early Iron Age wrought iron. Bronze is almost twice as hard on any hardness test

>can be killed with TERRY PRATCHETT'S SWORD.
I'd like to point out that Pratchett, worried of it being confiscated (and let's face it, because it's rad and exactly what you're supposed to do with magic swords) hid his sword somewhere.

So now there's a sword wrought of thunderbolt iron and finished with silver, and its current resting place is lost now with the man who hid it.
By all the power of narrative his sword can kill damn near anything.

I reckon being a Pharaoh would have been pretty cool.

you were the god-king of the most advanced civilization on earth and likely a bit inbred

Oh no, the province I live in is rife with inbreeding that's gross. I take it back.

Yuk get bad genes away from me please.

Didn't Damascus steel, used for making incredible strong swords, come from a deposit result of a meteorite?

this is what the owner of the rad dagger looked like

Archaeologists can even tell the provenance of various items' raw materials, on earth, within a couple hundred miles radius, at least for stone and early metals.

Literal fuccboi. Least he's not subsaharan black

The crystalline structure changes if you do any hot forging though (or any other such heating up).

No. Or at least, I've never heard anything such, there's no nickel content worth mentioning in pulad type steels (compared to usually 5-25% for an iron meteorite), and I don't think they could ever have been anywhere near as abundant as they are if they were relying on meteorite metal.

As for the strength of pulad blades, well, that may have been rather severely overhyped. It wasn't a terrible material or anything like that, but it certainly wasn't a superb one either.

actually population that practice inbreeding for a long time eventually get rid of defective genes so their offspring are more or less OK in the long run.

You see the two replies above yours? They get it. You don't get it.

>relevance to Veeky Forums: 0

>Two replies out of 37 are vaguely on-topic on an off-topic thread, it's fiiine!

Wrong. The Color bound to the dagger is seeking out the sword for an entirely different reason. Its mate is trapped in there.

WE WUZ SPACE TRAVELERS N' SHIEEET

>I suppose there's something to be said for the novelty of a meteor iron tool, but probably most meteoric iron wasn't actually known to be from a meteor in those times.
Not necessarily true.

>Ancient Egyptians attached great significance to meteoritic iron for the production of fine ornamental or ceremonial objects, the researchers say.

>"They were aware that these rare chunks of iron fell from the sky already in the 13th [Century] BCE, anticipating Western culture by more than two millennia," they write in their findings.

bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-36432635

>this nigger desn't know what a "plot hook" is.

Everything can be relevant to Veeky Forums. Everything.

WE

>The crystalline structure changes if you do any hot forging though (or any other such heating up).

This is bronze age egypt though - they didn't have forges capable of hot forging meteoric iron, so it's likely just been hammered until it was knife shaped.

...

Little we know, he was a handsome athlete before he took the burden of safeguadring the dagger.

WUZ

Earlier posters are really underestimating people. Ancient cultures all had an entire caste of people who watched the sky as part of their job. They were aware of what meteors were.

>I can post whatever I want on Veeky Forums and it'll totally be relevant because I can claim it's a "plot hook", whatever that this

The article says that they've identified which meteor the knife was made from.

> one in particular - which landed 150 miles (240km) west of Alexandria - contained similar levels of nickel and cobalt.

Yeah, I don't understand why this is a story.

COMETS AND SHIT