Very remarkable that there's a surviving ~3,770 year old written document mentioning a ~3,770 year old household object, and someone was able to match the two:
- "In the Amarna Letters, a diplomatic correspondence written on clay tablets and discovered in a royal archive in the south of Egypt, there is a list of gifts sent by King Tushratta of Mitanni in Anatolia, to Pharaoh Amenhotep III, Tutankhamun’s grandfather of Ancient Egypt when he married Princess Tadukhipa, the daughter of Tushratta. Among the gifts mentioned in the list is a dagger with an iron-made blade. The research of Arai’s team states that this is very likely to be the same dagger for two main reasons..."
> Wheeler called upon J.R.R. Tolkien, as Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University, to investigate the etymology of the name "Nodens" referred to in the curse.
What is your question? Separately from the public career of writer, Tolkien was a leading scholar of the Anglo-Saxon language (also called Old English).
I do believe that the point here is that iron daggers were not commonplace 3770 years ago. Bronze daggers would have been. Not my area of expertize though.
This view has started to change in the past decade. Iron is mentioned several times in Anatolia during the Old Assyrian Period c. 1850 BC. And this is several centuries before the time of King Tut. But iron of good quality was certainly rare and expensive, especially in places outside Anatolia.
Supposing that the dating of those African iron metallurgy sites is truly so early as claimed, that would be an independent discovery of the process, which does not seem to have had any influence upon the later discovery in Caucasus or Anatolia, of how to extract iron from iron ore, which spread during the 2nd millennium BC to the Mediterranean countries.
I believe iron is actually in the same ballpark as bronze. The benefit is more one of availability -- if you have the technology to handle iron, you don't need to go around and find sources for both tin and copper. And of course you might accidentally invent steel.
> Very remarkable that there's a surviving ~3,770 year old written document
> King Tushratta of Mitanni
Tangent, but Tushratta is one of my favorite historical examples for a completely different reason.
Tushratta's uncle killed his [Tushratta's] father in a coup and made himself regent for Tushratta. He then had Tushratta raised in isolation, with contact between Tushratta and other members of his family forbidden.
When Tushratta reached the age of majority, the uncle peacefully transferred power to him.
And, in a move that would utterly fail to surprise anyone from a civilization more recent than 3,800 years ago, Tushratta's first act as king was to have his uncle and his uncle's lackeys executed.
It still boggles my mind that the uncle allowed the power transfer to take place. Did he not realize what would happen?
Are we sure transition from uncle to nephew was truly peaceful. It makes no sense.
In general transition are so delicate and often fraught with violence.
I only know what I read in Brotherhood of Kings, and I agree it makes no sense.
But I don't really see anything that would salvage the situation to the point where it made some kind of sense. You'd need to imagine a political situation balanced so finely that Tushratta's uncle could hold on to the throne after killing his own brother, but killing his nephew would have been a step too far. And then he had years -- during which he had successfully isolated Tushratta from the rest of his family! -- to let some kind of accident happen to him, but it didn't.
Imagine the psychological power a weapon like that would hold over people at that time. Your leader possessing a dagger forged from light that fell from the heavens would probably inspire a lot of supernatural feelings.
Did they necessarily know that it was made from a meteorite? The dagger was a gift, and the Mitanni who made it might not have seen it land or made the connection; the meteorite could have already been there for some time before its iron was exploited.
I'm pretty sure even back then people were aware of celestial bodies like planets & stars. However meteorites, comets, things that came close to Earth's atmosphere were probably regarded differently depending on culture, social class/status(which vastly indicated level of education),etc. Also more likely than not those events were used politically to much success. I find it hard to believe that the 'brightest' people of any ancient period weren't aware that some of these 'small' objects might hit and thus remain on earth.
> Meteorite falls may have been the source of cultish worship. The cult in the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, possibly originated with the observation and recovery of a meteorite that was understood by contemporaries to have fallen to the earth from Jupiter, the principal Roman deity.[68] There are reports that a sacred stone was enshrined at the temple that may have been a meteorite.
However, that doesn't mean that the particular knife of Tutankhamun was necessarily known by the Egyptians to have been made from meteoric iron.
The Kaaba is pretty famous; the meteorite inside is much less famous than that. I would argue that the most famous meteorite would be the one that caused the Chixculub impact. We may not actually have pieces of it, but we know about it.
The article from OP (which is from this year, rather than 2016 as the BBC article) says that they believe it came from the Mitanni, but that their conclusion isn't a definitive one:
> The origin is another mystery around Tutankhamen’s blade. In the Amarna Letters, a diplomatic correspondence written on clay tablets and discovered in a royal archive in the south of Egypt, there is a list of gifts sent by King Tushratta of Mitanni in Anatolia, to Pharaoh Amenhotep III, Tutankhamun’s grandfather of Ancient Egypt when he married Princess Tadukhipa, the daughter of Tushratta. Among the gifts mentioned in the list is a dagger with an iron-made blade.
> The research of Arai’s team states that this is very likely to be the same dagger for two main reasons. The first being that iron-processing technology was already common practice at the time in the Mitanni regions. And second, because the dagger’s gold hilt shows a low percentage of calcium with no sulfur. This feature indicates the use of lime plaster as an adhesive material for the decoration of this part of the object, a frequently used material in Mitanni, which was used in Egypt until several centuries later, during the Ptolemaic period.
(I assume they meant 'which was [not] used in Egypt until several centuries later', otherwise that sentence doesn't quite make sense)
Any meteor that had enough of a solid core that was possible to work into a danger was likely quite large and destructive. Even though it likely didn't hit a human community, those that found it would have certainly noticed the destruction. What was the source of that destruction? The metal that is now in your dagger. I think a story of a Doom Dagger is more effective than a light from above.
I think that is the whole point - let us assume they did not know about the Widmanstätten patterns and s*iet we know now. What if they just enjoyed the beauty of that power from within;)
Without "knowing". So the power is "accidental" - accidentally in Tut's hands.
It was probably his downfall. "Why is the Pharaoh, who's supposed to be a god, bragging about having a weapon from the gods? Shouldn't he like, be able to buy them on god Amazon.com? Clearly he's an imposter..."
I've heard of this dagger before but I had no clue it was so large. 35.2 cm total length, 21.8 cm for just the blade. A little longer and it could almost be called a short sword. Very impressive for meteoric iron.
Is it? Pratchett's sword was hand-forged from meteoric iron, using fairly traditional methods and was "full-sized". (Though he used a combination of surface deposits and meteoric iron, and I'm not sure on the ratio.)
From what I understand, meteoric iron is very difficult to forge, tending to crack. Being able to bring it up to welding temperature helps deal with that, but according to the article this dagger was forged at a lower temperature.
Unrefined meteoric iron is brittle, yes. When you remove the impurities, it works just like normal iron though. But it was the only source of iron available to some cultures for a long time.
Humans originally used meteoric metal became they lacked the ability to mine and smelt the ore themselves. When humanity gained the technological ability to reliably and economically refine iron ore themselves, meteoric metal was discarded (rightfully) as inferior and more trouble than it was worth.
In a few months we will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the tomb's discovery. We will also celebrate the 200th anniversary of Champollion's decipherment of hieroglyphics sometime this year as well!
- "In the Amarna Letters, a diplomatic correspondence written on clay tablets and discovered in a royal archive in the south of Egypt, there is a list of gifts sent by King Tushratta of Mitanni in Anatolia, to Pharaoh Amenhotep III, Tutankhamun’s grandfather of Ancient Egypt when he married Princess Tadukhipa, the daughter of Tushratta. Among the gifts mentioned in the list is a dagger with an iron-made blade. The research of Arai’s team states that this is very likely to be the same dagger for two main reasons..."