Ancient Egyptian beads confirmed to be made from 'space rock'

Now it's confirmed: the beads found on an Egyptian necklace excavated in 1911 were indeed from fragments of a meteorite, researchers in the United Kingdom said.

 

A team from the University College London's Petrie Museum said a test using gamma rays proved the beads were made of space rock and not iron as initially thought.

 

The researchers said their findings suggested the Egyptians hammered the rock several times to flatten the metal, then rolled it to form bead-shaped tubes, UK's Daily Mail reported.

 

"The really exciting outcome of this research is that we were for the first time able to demonstrate conclusively that there are typical trace elements such as cobalt and germanium present in these beads, at levels that only occur in meteoritic iron," said Professor Thilo Rehren, lead author of the Journal of Archaeological Science study.

 

Rehren said the beads were created with "multiple cycles of hammering" and not traditional carving or drilling stone techniques.

 

On the other hand, the Daily Mail said the researchers not only got a chance to see the Egyptians' advanced knowledge and skill of metal work, but also the religious significance they had for meteorites.

 

"The sky was very important to the ancient Egyptians. Something that falls from the sky is going to be considered as a gift from the gods," said Joyce Tyldesley, an Egyptologist at the University of Manchester, UK, and a co-author of the paper on the discovery.

 

The bead, which dated from 3350 to 3600 BC - thousands of years before Egypt’s Iron Age - was initially thought to be from a meteorite because of its nickel-rich iron composition.

 

However, this was challenged in the 1980s when academics suggested they may be samples of early smelting attempts.

 

Unique pattern

 

Earlier this year, researchers found some ancient Egyptian trinkets, including a 5,000-year-old iron bead that they believe could have originated from a meteorite.

 

Egyptologists from the Open University scanned beads found in a cemetery near el-Gerzeh village in Lower Egypt, using scanning electron microscopy and computed tomography.

 

The scan showed high nickel content - and a Widmanstätten pattern, a distinctive crystalline structure found only in iron meteorites that cooled slowly inside their parent asteroids when the solar system was forming.

 

Researchers from UCL's Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology then used non-invasive neutrons and gamma rays to measure the nickel and phosphorous levels in the beads.

 

Unique fingerprint

 

Philip Withers, a professor of Materials Science at The University of Manchester, said meteorites "have a unique microstructural and chemical fingerprint because they cooled incredibly slowly as they travelled through space."

 

"'It was really interesting to find that fingerprint turn up in Egyptian artefacts," he said.

 

But the Daily Mail report said meteorite iron had "profound implications" for the ancient Egyptians, both in celestial origin and in early metallurgy attempts.

 

"Today, we see iron first and foremost as a practical, rather dull metal. To the ancient Egyptians, however, it was a rare and beautiful material which, as it fell from the sky, surely had some magical/religious properties. They therefore used this remarkable metal to create small objects of beauty and religious significance which were so important to them that they chose to include them in their graves," Tyldesley said. — TJD, GMA News