A team of researchers from Italy and Egypt found that for making dagger from the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun was used meteorite – informs the website Discovery News.
Italian researchers from the University of Milan and the University of Pisa and archaeologists from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo conducted a new study dagger, which was in the sarcophagus of Pharaoh Tutankhamun in his tomb in the Valley of the Kings next to the right thigh royal mummy.
Tutankhamun was the ruler of Egypt from the XVIII dynasty (1550-1292 BC), prevailing in the period approx. 1333-1323 BC His intact tomb was discovered in 1922 by English archaeologist Howard Carter.
Carter wrote in 1925 a dagger of Tutankhamen, located now as an exhibit at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, as “very ornate gold dagger with a crystal head.”
Mainly dagger performed masterfully with homogeneous nierdzewiejącego metal, and the handle of gold. The dagger is made of gold sheath, decorated with motifs lily flower on one side and the shape rays feathers and the head of a jackal on the other.
Scientists have long suspected that a variety of early iron products produced at the time of the Bronze Age and previously, they can be built only with the use of metal alloys contained in meteorites that fell to Earth.
technological advances and the use of new research techniques now enables scientists to conduct cutting-edge research and detailed verification of various hypotheses.
a team of researchers from Italy and Egypt under the direction of Dr. Daniela Comelli from the Department of Physics, University of Milan conducted a study of blade dagger of Tutankhamen, using non-invasive method of spectrometry, X-ray fluorescence, and the results published in the publication “Meteoritics and Planetary Science.”
the meteorites ferrous iron is present as iron-nickel alloy containing at least 4 percent. nickel and other additives, such as cobalt, phosphorus, sulfur and charcoal.
The team of Dr. Comelli determined that the nickel content in the test dagger is 11 pron., and the ratio of nickel and cobalt corresponds to the values typical for these meteorites iron in which are preserved some of the features of the beginnings of the solar system and the formation of the planets.
the researchers studied a possible location for obtaining a fragment of a meteorite, given the area with a radius of 2,000 kilometers from the center in the Red Sea . In this area there are 20 known sites fall of the iron meteorites.
As it turned out, the ratio of nickel and cobalt in the dagger corresponds to only one known location meteorite iron, on a limestone plain near the present port city of Marsa Matruh on the Mediterranean Sea, approx. 150 km west of Alexandria.
According to Dr Comelli, the study of iron artifacts from the time far before the Iron Age gives very interesting results. Craftsmanship dagger Tutankhamun indicates that in ancient Egypt in the fourteenth century. BC blacksmiths could masterfully turn more metal coming from the meteorite.
According to Dr. Comelli, dagger Tutankhamun is not the only “stellar” object in his tomb. The breastplate of Pharaoh’s amulet in the shape of a scarab, which was described by Howard Carter as an object made of greenish-yellow chalcedony – common mineral that is a variation of silica.
In fact, the amulet was created so-called. glass desert, also called enamel Libyan desert, the found in 1932 in the Libyan Desert in an area with a radius of 100 km.
Glass desert is a greenish-yellow pieces of vitrified silica, resulting meteorite impact on Earth’s surface.
in Egypt, Libyan desert glass occurs naturally only in the area of the Great Sand Sea – desert in the central-western Egypt and eastern Libya.
(az)
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