King Tut's Dagger Came From Outer Space—and Also Syria

King Tut had a sweet dagger. Of course, the young king also had a sweet wardrobe, chariots, shrines, and a horde of other treasures, all discovered in the early 1900s along with his famous mummy. Still, the dagger has always been the source of much conjecture. And it’s not the gold sheath and hilt, or even the lovely lapis lazuli inlays, but the iron blade that has sparked the most interest. As reported in 2016, researchers using fluorescence spectrometry determined that the blade was of meteoric origin. But how and where the blade was manufactured remained unclear. In a February study published in Meteoritics and Planetary Science, researchers chipped away at that mystery.

The iron dagger was forged long before the start of the Iron Age. Indeed, as explained by Ars Technica, "There is no archaeological evidence of iron smelting in Egypt until the 6th century BCE," some 700 years after Tut’s demise. But before they discovered how to extract base metal from native ores through high-temp smelting, humans were finding, heating, and pounding on meteorites they found lying around, as with this dagger. After subjecting the blade to nondestructive 2-D chemical analyses, researchers were able to zero in on the kind of meteorite that had been used to make it. They observed a cross-stitch pattern that had previously been seen on other natural objects and is called the Widmanstätten pattern; it indicated the meteorite was an octahedrite, the largest type of iron meteorite.

To determine the actual dagger's origins, researchers delved into the Amarna letters, a cache of cuneiform-inscribed tablets from the era. Per ScienceAlert.com, the gold hilt and other clues hint at foreign origins, possibly Mitanni, Anatolia (modern Syria). That syncs with an Amarna letter that describes a gold and iron dagger gifted from the king of Mitanni to Amenhotep III, Tut's grandpa. Tsutomu Saito, who has previously studied items forged from iron meteorites, tells the Asahi Shimbun that pre-Iron Age artisans relied on both instinct and experience to find the right temperature to heat the materials they used. "This an important finding that shows the starting point of mankind’s quest to develop iron manufacturing technology," he said. (More King Tut stories.)