The word was used in many texts including the funerary Pyramid Texts, early religious writings dating from approximately 2375 BC but likely to have been composed far earlier, carved on the internal walls of some pyramids. The word “bi-A” was eventually translated as “iron”, but could easily have referred a range of hard, dense, iron-like materials. The earliest hieroglyphic word for iron was greatly debated by translators, who frequently confused the words for copper and iron. The ancient language also offers clues as to how how iron was perceived by Egyptians – and that they knew meteorites were a source of the metal. Diane Johnson/The Manchester Museum, Author provided The earliest known ancient Egypt iron object: a meteorite iron bead from a prehistoric cemetery. The word “benben” is derived from the verb “weben”, meaning “ to shine”. For example, the “Benben” stone worshipped in the sun temple of the god Ra at Heliopolis is thought to have possibly been a meteorite. Meteorites may have even played a more direct role in state religion. As a result, they could have seen all iron as a divine material that wasn’t appropriate to work into a practical, everyday form and that should be reserved only for high-status people. If ancient Egyptians knew that iron could be found in meteorites that came from the sky – the place of the gods – it may have been symbolically important to them. This precious gift from nature still required shaping into a useful form, often resulting in very basic iron objects, such as small thin metal pieces that could be used as blades or bent into shapes. We have evidence that numerous prehistoric societies worldwide which did not have access to ores or knowledge of smelting made use of metallic iron found in occasional meteorites. One explanation for this may be that the readily accessible iron ores were of poor quality so couldn’t be worked into more useful metal.īut iron doesn’t just come from iron ore. But the ore was mostly used to create pigments for art and make up. There were abundant supplies of iron ore in both Egypt and the Sinai peninsula and textual sources indicate that Egyptians were aware of the metal from early in their history. This requires considerable know-how, effort and tools that we have no evidence for in ancient Egypt. These need to be processed by heating them with other materials (smelting) to extract a low-quality form of iron, which is then beaten with hammers to remove impurities. The most common natural source of metal iron on Earth is iron ores – rocks that contain iron chemically bonded to other elements. When Tutankhamun died – 800 years earlier – iron was a rarer material than gold. Even the large amounts of iron-rich smelting waste products found in the Delta region could actually have been produced by attempts to make copper. There’s no archaeological evidence for significant iron working anywhere in the Nile Valley. Until recently, we didn’t think that the ancient Egyptians were particularly good at producing iron objects until late in their history, around 500 BC. But why did they use such an unusual source for the metal when there’s plenty of iron here on Earth? Now an analysis of a dagger found in Tutankhamun’s tomb has given us strong evidence that this was the case – and that the Egyptians knew the iron had come from the sky. Master Swords.Scientists have long speculated that the ancient Egyptians used metal from meteorites to make iron objects. Like any rare materials purchased in the Black Market, making a profit is not going to happen.Ĭraft Meteorite to complete quests, collection pages, and to create the new swords, i.e. Meteorite can be obtained for free from the various ways listed below. It costs 3 Smith Tokens normally, or ~10,000 coins to buy in the Black Market. Meteorite is the 17th material available in the shop.
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