King Tut’s Meteorite Dagger

Even by today’s standards, getting your hands on a knife made from a meteorite is something special. It isn’t everyday that knife makers are able to get their hands on material from space – and even when they do, there is no guarantee that the knife will be top-notch. It is all the more amazing then that King Tut’s own dagger, originally excavated in 1922, turns out to have been made from material salvaged from a meteorite.

In a study titled “The Meteoritic Origin of Tutankhamun’s Iron Dagger Blade” published in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science, it has been revealed that the extremely young ruler of Ancient Egypt was packing a knife made with some seriously rare materials. According to the the team of Egyptian and Italian researchers who used X-Ray analysis, the blade on this knife is composed of iron, nickel, and cobalt – a composition that matches the Kharga meteorite that fell west of Alexandria. This team’s finding seems to jive with a term that began to appear in hieroglyphic that translate’s roughly to ‘Iron of the sky’. It would seem to suggest that a huge meteorite must have hit the earth, and that ancient Egyptians went out on an expedition to go locate it, although we’re sure others will have their own theories.