Royal Tutankhamun’s Meteoric Iron Dagger Out of This World Forged from the Stars!

Discover the legendary dagger buried with Pharaoh Tutankhamun  made from meteoric iron, literally forged from a piece of the cosmos. This rare artifact proves the ancient Egyptians worked with materials not of this Earth!

Unearthed from the golden tomb of the boy king, Tutankhamun’s dagger is unlike anything found in ancient

Egypt — forged from meteoric iron, a metal from beyond our world. 

This legendary blade proves that the ancient Egyptians had access to celestial materials and incredible craftsmanship. Was this a royal weapon, a cosmic talisman, or both? Join us for a quick look into the most mysterious dagger of the ancient world.

The dagger, both a rare evidence for the early use of iron and an impressive example of ancient metalworking, made headlines again in 2016 as its material was shown to “originate from space”. In February 2020, CIT researchers reached the Egyptian Museum in Cairo to obtain new results concerning the dagger’s material and craftsmanship. According to their published research paper, they conducted nondestructive and noncontact chemical analyses of the meteoritic dagger blade at the Museum. For comparison, they analyzed the Shirahagi iron meteorite, the source of the Japanese historical sword Ryuseito which is housed in Toyama Science Museum; analysis in Toyama took place in the same way and using the same analytical instrument and techniques as in Cairo.

That meteorite, named Kharga, was found 150 miles (240km) west of Alexandria, at the seaport city of Mersa Matruh, which in the age of Alexander the Great – the fourth century BC – was known as Amunia. Tut’s dagger. Tut’s dagger. Photograph: Polytechnic University of Milan.

Although people have worked with copper, bronze and gold since 4,000BC, ironwork came much later, and was rare in ancient Egypt. In 2013, nine blackened iron beads, excavated from a cemetery near the Nile in northern Egypt, were found to have been beaten out of meteorite fragments, and also a nickel-iron alloy. The beads are far older than the young pharaoh, dating to 3,200BC.