When British Egyptologist Howard Carter discovered the relatively intact burial chamber of Tutankhamun’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings in southern Egypt in 1922, he found among the multitude of objects piled inside a mysterious iron dagger very well preserved. With a roughly polished double-edged blade, a hilt made mostly of gold, and a prominent, sinuous crack in the center, the dagger’s origin and manufacture soon became an enigma.
Tutankhamun reigned during the 18th dynasty of Ancient Egypt, between 1361 and 1352 before the common era. That period corresponds to the late bronze age, and thus about a century and a half before the time when iron processing technology was acquired and its use spread, the iron age. Some earlier artifacts, such as the pharaoh’s dagger mentioned above, were made from the iron of metallic meteorites that one day reached the surface of the Earth. But the high quality of the object indicated that it came from somewhere where the ability to work meteoritic iron was well established, so where and how it was made has been a puzzle for years.
Now, a new studio from a group of Japanese and Egyptian researchers developed at the historic Egyptian Museum in Cairo has been able to shed new light on the dagger. Using non-destructive chemical analyses, the team has determined that the dagger blade’s parent meteorite was most likely octahedrite, the most common class of iron meteorites. It has also determined that the weapon must have been made by heating at a low temperature and then forging, and that the object was a gift brought from Anatolia.
“The origin of Tutankhamun’s iron dagger is important because it directly affects the history of human civilization, widely accepted from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age,” he tells EL PAÍS Tomoko Arai, a scientist at the Planetary Exploration Research Center of the Chiba Institute of Technology, in Japan, and one of the authors of the study. “The time of King Tut [como se le conoce en el mundo anglosajón], around 1300 BC. C., corresponds to the late bronze age, and it is believed that the iron age began around 1200 BC. C.”, he points out.
Arai’s team was able to establish that the iron in the dagger came from an octahedrite by analyzing the distribution of nickel in the object’s blade. In this sense, its nickel map shows the presence of a pattern called Widmanstätten, a kind of pattern of lamellae present in metallic meteorites such as octahedrite. In the case of Tutankhamun’s dagger, these lamellae were about 1 millimeter thick, but imperceptible to the naked eye due to the polishing work that was done.
Regarding the manufacture of the weapon, the researchers point out that the conservation of the Widmanstätten pattern rules out that the method could be forging at high temperatures. On the other hand, the extensive loss of sulfur, which manifests itself in the form of dark spots on the blade of the dagger, suggests that it was heated to a temperature of between 700 and 950 degrees, a range that corresponds to heating at low or moderate temperature.
“The dagger must have been made by forging at a low or moderate temperature, so that the Widmanstätten structure could survive during manufacture,” explains Arai. “Previous studies did not find the Widmanstätten structure because it cannot be seen with the naked eye. [Pero] once we did the mapping of nickel elements on the entire surface of the dagger, the structure appeared”, he adds. “That was our wow moment.”
Another of the unknowns surrounding Tutankhamun’s dagger is its origin. The Amarna Letters, a diplomatic correspondence written on clay tablets and discovered in a royal archive in southern Egypt, lists gifts sent by King Tushratta of Mitanni in Anatolia to Pharaoh Amenophis III of Ancient Egypt when This, who was the grandfather of Tutankhamun, married the princess Taduhepa, daughter of Tushratta. Among the gifts mentioned in the list is a dagger with an iron blade.
Arai’s team’s research says it is very likely the same dagger for two reasons. The first is that iron processing technology was already known at that time in the Mitanni regions. And the second is that the gold handle of the dagger has a low percentage of calcium devoid of sulfur. This characteristic indicates the use of lime plaster as an adhesive material for the decoration of this part of the object, a material that was already in frequent use in Mitanni, but that began to be used in Egypt several centuries later, during the Ptolemaic period.
“The kingdom of Mittani in Mesopotamia as an origin is our suggestion, based on the currently available evidence that we obtained through non-destructive and non-contact chemical analysis,” explains Arai, who, however, refuses to consider the mystery solved: ” It is not yet a definitive conclusion.”
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