Meteoric Blades on Bronze Age Weapons

[David]

Originally Posted by motan

Sorry David, you are right, of course. I, like some others here, have mixed up my pharaohs. The treaty was signed in Ramses II's time, about 60-80 years later than Tutankhamun's reign. You got me there.
But the rest arguments are valid. There are several pre iron-age iron artifacts found in the Middle-East, India and China and not all of them can be identified as meteorite iron, but 10% or more Nickel in iron is difficult to explain in other way than meteorite origin, or do you have another explanation?

Well Motan, i'm not suggesting any explanations here, only looking for something more than speculation and conjecture that might help solve some of these mysteries. Alan has put forth that the KT must have originated from the Hittites, that there is no other possibility. I remain a little more open to the question. He also has suggested that the testing process that has identified this blade as meteorite could be flawed. I tend to agree that this testing processes isn't fool proof. So maybe the blade is meteorite and maybe it is not. If it is not i think that Alan is probably right, the Hittites were really the only group that had the technology to smelt iron and make a blade from terrestrial iron at this time. If indeed the KT blade is terrestrial then it may have come to KT threw various avenues. I am not convinced that the diplomacy existed between these two great powers at that time that the Hittites themselves would have gifted it to the pharaoh directly, but it may have come indirectly to the Egyptian court. However, if the blade actually is meteorite i am also not convinced that the Egyptians couldn't have made it themselves since apparently meteorite can be forged without being smelted and the Egyptians had been working with meteorite for almost 2000 years before the time of Tutankhamun. So this is a metal that they were familiar working with and highly valued. Could the Egyptian have created the KT dagger on their own? I would not count that possibility out even if i do believe it is more likely to have a Hittite origin.

[motan]

Hi David, I don"t want this to become too lengthy, but still..
Diplomatic relation between Hatti and Egypt certainly existed around that time. Suppiluliuma I, the contemporary Hittite king, wanted to wed his son to Tutankhamun's widow, but the boy died before it happened. The Hittite wanted a front against common enemies like the Hurrians and Mittani.
Since the advent of the New Kingdom in Egypt, Pharaohs have been campaigning in Syria, Canaan and Lebanon, where they must have met with the Hettites in battle. They could obtain iron blades from the slain or captures.

Anyway, I am a scientist by training, so if there are lab results, I believe them at least until the next results. Is this 100% sure? Of course not, but it is real evidence and you need real evidence to refute it,
Eytan

[A. G. Maisey]

There are several things I would like to address in these last few posts, and I'll make it as quick as I can.

Is the KT dagger meteoritic material?
If it is truly 10% nickel as Motan advises, it is virtually certain to be of meteoritic origin. Perhaps Motan has read the entire report, I would have liked to, but I baulked at paying to do so.

Does an x-ray examination of a piece of forged and welded ferric material prove that it is of meteoritic origin?
In my opinion no, but it does present a strong hypothesis that appears to be ready to be developed into a theory, at which point it can be attacked and defended.
Please note:- at this time I am not in any way attempting to refute Jambon's findings, but I have been a professional doubter for so long that I tend to very often doubt things that others take at face value.

Was the KT dagger blade made by Hittites, or by some other people?
Prior to the time of KT's death only the Hittites possessed the technology to make this dagger blade.
This technology most definitely did not exist in Egypt until about 600 years after the death of KT. This is not my opinion, it is the opinion of historians who are expert in this field, as just a little research will confirm.

Is it at all possible that the KT dagger blade might have been made in Egypt?
No, it is not.
Meteoritic material had been cold forged in Egypt for a long time prior to KT's death, however, Egypt's metal technology rested firmly on its pottery technology:- the fires used to make pottery were hot enough to smelt and forge copper & tin, but they were a very long way short of being hot enough to weld ferric material. The Hittites did learn how to build forges hot enough to weld ferric material, and it is a very short step from welding ferric material to smelting ferric material. To hot work meteoritic material you need to be able to generate weld temperatures in your forge.

How did KT come into possession of this dagger?
I have absolutely no idea, and I prefer not to engage in speculation.

Did diplomacy exist between Egypt and the Hittite nation?
Beyond doubt, yes, it did.
In fact it existed between all members of the "Great Powers Club"
It existed in several forms, but principally in the system that involved the exchange of gifts, including women to be used as wives for rulers.
This diplomacy is well documented, again, research will confirm this.

Was the gift of King Tushratta's daughter an act that was forced upon him in an effort to improve his alliance with Egypt?
Yes, it was.
Tushratta's sister was already one of Amenhotep's wives, and had been so for about 15 years at the time KT gifted his daughter to Amenhotep. The alliance was already in place, but KT was not prepared for conflict with the Hittites, so he gifted his daughter to Amenhotep because he thought he would need assistance before long. I think David said something similar in one of his posts.

Amenhotep III reigned 1386BC - 1353BC
Tushratta reigned 1382BC - 1342BC
Suppiluliumas reigned 1344BC - 1322BC

Prior to Suppililiumas becoming the Hittite ruler, the Mitani had been stronger than the Hatti (ie, Hittites), however once King Suppi took the throne things changed. There was a mere two year overlap in the beginning of King Suppi's reign and the end of King Tush's reign.
King Tush gifted his daughter Tadukhipa to Amenhotep only a couple of years before KT himself was murdered by his son.
Why did he gift his daughter?
He was forced to do so because of the actions of King Suppi.
When a person is forced to act in a particular way by the actions of another person, it is said that he is "dancing to so & so's tune".

My earlier comment :-
" I suspect that investigation might demonstrate that by the time Tushratta traded off his daughter to Amenhotep III, the Mitrani were already dancing the jig to a tune played by the Hatti/Hittites"
has indeed been proven to be correct.

It does not require conquest to cause somebody to dance to the tune of another, all it requires is for the person who is playing the tune to exert sufficient pressure to make the other dance.

Most of the above is the result of google searches. I ran out of memory, and in the case of some things I simply did not have the necessary knowledge.

What is the difference between meteoritic iron and terrestrial iron?
Meteoritic iron is already in a solid form ready for use. I have worked with it, and if I had had sufficient of the stuff I could easily have produced a blade from it. Some iron meteorites contain nickel in relatively high percentages.

Terrestrial iron ores need to be reduced to turn them into usable material. Iron rusts, which means it combines with moisture, so before terrestrial iron ores can be worked they need to have the moisture removed from the ore, this is what the smelting process does, it removes moisture and produces a solid lump of material called a bloom. This bloom can then be worked in a forge.
Smelting can be used with any ferric raw material, including meteoritic material.
However, in the case of meteoritic material, and also limonite, forge processing is also possible, which is not the case with haematite. Haematite is probably the most prolific source of iron. I doubt that haematite is found in combination with nickel, but limonite is found in combination with nickel, and also with cobalt, however the nickel percentage in limonite is far less than is usual in an iron-nickel meteorite.

This brings us back to the KT dagger:- if the nickel in that blade is 10% it is almost certainly meteoritic.

[motan]

Thank you A.G.Maisey for the comprehensive review and I would not think of saying anything against it. I mean that seriously and without (iron)y.
It actually supports most of the points I have made in my few posts to this thread.
My first point was that I believe the dagger/sword is made of meteorite iron, but I don't understand how they worked it because they didn't fully control forging iron (until much later).
Second, that there were both gift exchange and battles between Egypt and Hatti in this period, so theoretically, there was plenty of opportunity to get a blade made by Hittites, certainly for the pharaoh of Egypt.
Third, and we may not agree on that one, as bad a source as Wiki can be at times, I do not think they cited the numbers wrongly from a scientific paper and I tend to believe the numbers: 11% nickel and 0.6 cobalt, even without reading the original paper.
Eytan

[David]

Well Alan, i am glad i could be of some assistance in allowing you to brush up on your Egyptian history. Hopefully it wasn't too painful for you in the end, but it does seem pertinent to the question at hand.
I won't press you much more on it, but while i do agree with most of what you wrote i do have a couple of questions.

Originally Posted by A. G. Maisey

Did diplomacy exist between Egypt and the Hittite nation?
Beyond doubt, yes, it did.
In fact it existed between all members of the "Great Powers Club"
It existed in several forms, but principally in the system that involved the exchange of gifts, including women to be used as wives for rulers.
This diplomacy is well documented, again, research will confirm this.

If this is the case, can someone please point me to the well documented diplomacy that existed between Tutankhamen's court and that of the Hittite. KT's court mind you, not his predecessors or any pharaoh who followed him.

Originally Posted by A. G. Maisey

King Tush gifted his daughter Tadukhipa to Amenhotep only a couple of years before KT himself was murdered by his son.

I am assuming this was a typo. You have all through this conversation been abbreviating King Tutankhamen as KT. Surely you did not mean to say that KT was killed by his son since he did not have any sons, or any children that lived for that matter. Tushratta was apparently killed by a grouped led by one of his sons. Can i assume that is what you meant to say?

[A. G. Maisey]

Eytan --- I tend to avoid Wiki, especially if it involves questions relating to things that I know very little about, but very high nickel in iron almost invariably indicates meteoritic origin, so whether it is 10%, 11%, or in fact anything above +/- 6% I'll accept that the raw material for the KT dagger is most likely to be meteoritic in origin.

In respect of method of manufacture, I'm now wondering if perhaps this might be a casting. I know I've been pushing the "forge barrow" all through this discussion, and that is because I know more than a little bit about forging, both from a historical perspective, and from a practical perspective. This added to the fact that up until yesterday, everything I wrote in this thread came from my own memory.

However, yesterday I found I could go no further without spending time on net searches, which I did, and I came across a lot of things that I did not know. In the early iron age/late bronze age (the two overlapped) some iron artifacts were cast. When you think about it, this is logical, as these people had been casting bronze, why not try casting this new metal the same way?

But if you are going to cast iron you need very high temperatures, so maybe iron smelting came before iron forging in this part of the world. In Africa it appears not to have, but maybe in other places it did. A development of the bronze smelting furnace rather than a development of a separate technology.

With forge technology, working meteoritic material is not really all that difficult, it can be done in very primitive forges, in fact my own solid fuel forge (now out of commission) is no more than an adaptation of a 2000 year old design.

But if we work iron by forging, it requires welding, and in the pics of the KT dagger that I have seen, I cannot see any evidence of welding. Maybe the evidence is there but can only be seen with the dagger in hand. Maybe there are no traces of welding, in which case it must be cast.

In any case, if the KT dagger is a casting, it could have been shaped by stock removal.

David --- thank you for pointing out that KT blunder.

I had actually put King Tut out of my mind, sure, he finished up with the dagger, but that is the only thing we know of his involvement with it.

Yes, this discussion has been all about King Tut's dagger, but we know it as KT's dagger because it was found it with KT, we do not know how KT came into possession of that dagger.

Because we have not the smallest inkling of how KT came into possession of the dagger, it seems to me to be illogical to assume that it came to him directly from point of origin.

Because of this I have shifted my consideration of the dagger to only three points which I consider to be the important questions:-

1) what is the King Tut Dagger made from?
2) how was it made?
3) where was it made?

As I have taken this position of focus on these three factors, I have not found it necessary to pursue investigation of diplomatic ties with any particular Egyptian ruler.

How the dagger came into Egypt, how it came into King Tut's possession might certainly be of some interest, and by application of logic might assist in identification of source, but to my mind, this has ceased to be a political question and has assumed the nature of a technical question.

So David, diplomatic contact between King Tut's court and the court of the Hittites?

King Tut was 8 or 9 when he came to the throne, he was 18 or 19 when he died. During his entire reign the Hittite Empire was ruled by King Suppiluliuma.
Egypt was engaged in war with the Hittites, and seemed to consistently lose.

Under conditions such as these I rather think that any diplomacy that might have been going on, would have been a little bit fractured.

Personally I would not expect to see much evidence of diplomacy between the court of King Tut and the court of King Suppi. The form that diplomacy took at this time was the exchange of royal gifts, all the Egyptians and Hittites seemed to be exchanging were blows.

Tut's widow clearly tried to begin the diplomatic process again by inviting King Suppi to send one of his sons as a consort. The son was murdered during his journey to Egypt. Probably just as well according to the experts.

But then, maybe it was not King Tut's widow who wrote to King Suppi requesting one of his sons as a consort. A current opinion amongst some scholars seems to be that it was Akhenaten's widow, not Tut's widow, who wanted to break with tradition and pollute the royal blood.

Deeper you dig the more confusing it gets.

I've run out of memory, I do not have time to do google searches, in any case I do not like google searches, I prefer books, so I think this might be my last post to this thread. At the moment I have nothing more to add.

[Timo Nieminen]

Originally Posted by A. G. Maisey

Terrestrial iron ores need to be reduced to turn them into usable material. Iron rusts, which means it combines with moisture, so before terrestrial iron ores can be worked they need to have the moisture removed from the ore, this is what the smelting process does, it removes moisture and produces a solid lump of material called a bloom. This bloom can then be worked in a forge.
Smelting can be used with any ferric raw material, including meteoritic material.
However, in the case of meteoritic material, and also limonite, forge processing is also possible, which is not the case with haematite. Haematite is probably the most prolific source of iron. I doubt that haematite is found in combination with nickel, but limonite is found in combination with nickel, and also with cobalt, however the nickel percentage in limonite is far less than is usual in an iron-nickel meteorite.

This brings us back to the KT dagger:- if the nickel in that blade is 10% it is almost certainly meteoritic.

Jambon doesn't analyse the dagger; he uses the measurements by Comelli et al. 2016, (10.8% Ni, 0.58% Co, and also quotes the measurement given by Ströbele et al. 2016 (ref at end), 12.9% Ni.

A few comments on smelting etc.:

"Smelting" is the conversion of ore to metal. For iron, this is typically done by using carbon to bond to the oxygen in an iron oxide, giving CO or CO2 and metallic iron. For a metallic meteoric, there is no need for smelting, because it's already metallic. For any ore, you smelt, by definition, to obtain metal. For iron, the temperature required is well below the melting point of iron, and the chemistry can be made to happen in the solid state, giving a bloom. The is some conflation of "smelting" and "melting" in non-technical usage. You can melt with smelting (just start with metal instead of ore) and smelt without melting (as possible with iron).

When an ore is heated to remove moisture, the process is "roasting", not smelting. Some ores (like limonite) are hydrated, and some are not. Roasting can also be used to make other changes in the ore, such as converting sulphides to oxides. The difference between smelting and roasting is that smelting produces metal and roasting produces a different type of ore. When limonite is roasted, it's converted to haematite, which is then smelting as usual.

The usual early traditional method to smelt limonite (e.g., bog iron) was to roast and then smelt in a bloomery furnace.

For details of the chemistry of smelting and roasting:
https://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/am...ne/ra_2_2.html
or the version with frames if you want to navigate to elsewhere in the document:
https://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/iss/index.html

I haven't heard of limonite with significant amounts of nickel. The common high-nickel iron ore is laterite. Jambon gives some data for nickel and cobalt content of various laterites.

Other refs:

Comelli et al. 2016: https://doi.org/10.1111/maps.12664

Jambon: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2017.09.008

Ströbele et al., 2016:
F. Ströbele, K. Broschat, C. Koeberl, J. Zipfel, H. Hassan, Ch Eckmann
The iron objects of tutanchamun. Metalla
Archäometrie und Denkmalpflege 2016, Göttingen
Sonderheft, 8 (2016), pp. 186-189

[A. G. Maisey]

I spoke too soon.

Good stuff Timo, and clearly more advanced than my own knowledge, especially so in your use of terminology, my own terminology is that used by people who actually work with the materials.

For instance, there used to be a gentleman named Mike Peterson who did a smelt once a year. Mike has passed on now but he lived on the South Coast of NSW. In technical terms he probably did not really smelt, what he did was to collect a lot of various kinds of iron and steel, stack with charcoal and produce a bloom. Or maybe Mike did "melt with smelting", as you have noted. I have a piece of one of the blooms he produced, and have worked with this material. It requires quite gentle initial welding, not dissimilar to welding meteorite. It makes very good blades.

My understanding is that limonite comes in various forms and that the solid forms of limonite were forge worked in early times by smiths in sub-Saharan Africa. I actually have a few pieces of limonite, identified as such by a metallurgist, I picked it up at Bungonia and had it for years before I knew what it was. I have not worked with it, but from the look and feel of it, it seems as if it could be worked in a forge.

Yes, I understand that limonite was worked in later times by heating to remove moisture, and then to use smelting, but in early times my understanding was that it was worked in the forge by gradually increasing temperatures, first removing the moisture then welding and folding.

Yes when limonite does carry nickel, the content is quite low, I think something like 1%-2% ?

I know nothing about laterite ores, I've heard the name, but only in connection with soil and with building materials.

[Timo Nieminen]

Originally Posted by A. G. Maisey

For instance, there used to be a gentleman named Mike Peterson who did a smelt once a year. Mike has passed on now but he lived on the South Coast of NSW. In technical terms he probably did not really smelt, what he did was to collect a lot of various kinds of iron and steel, stack with charcoal and produce a bloom. Or maybe Mike did "melt with smelting", as you have noted. I have a piece of one of the blooms he produced, and have worked with this material. It requires quite gentle initial welding, not dissimilar to welding meteorite. It makes very good blades.

Yes, technically not smelting. This is a traditional process for steel-making, starting with iron. It's one of the 4 ancient steel-making methods (make steel directly in a bloomery furnace during the smelting process, make iron in a smelter and then carburise in a second step, make cast iron in a smelter (a blast furnace rather than a bloomery) and decarburise the cast iron, and crucible steel).

The goal is to carburise the iron to produce steel, and done right it can make excellent steel. The diffusion of the carbon into the iron is the same as what happens when you make steel directly in a bloomery. You don't want it to melt, since you want high-carbon steel, not cast iron, so you get a bloom. I guess (but it's only a guess) that the bloom would be much cleaner than the bloom from a bloomery smelter, since if you just put in iron and charcoal, you should get a bloom full of slag.

Steel made this way is called oroshigane by the Japanese, and it's still done for swordmaking.

For those interested, video showing this kind of thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5Zyf8svLKI

I've heard of people doing similar things with forge scale, which is smelting (since it's an oxide).

Originally Posted by A. G. Maisey

Yes when limonite does carry nickel, the content is quite low, I think something like 1%-2% ?

I know nothing about laterite ores, I've heard the name, but only in connection with soil and with building materials.

The only limonite I know anything of the chemistry of is bog iron, which AFAIK has only trace amounts of nickel. So time to learn more.

[A pause, to go away and learn more.]

OK, the deal with laterites is that "laterite" is a very broad category, and includes rocks that are iron ores and rocks that aren't iron ores. If they are iron ores, the iron is usually in the form of limonite. 70% of laterites contain limonite.

Anatolian laterites have a Nickel:Iron ratio of about 1:30. If you made nickel-iron from them with 100% efficiency, you'd get about 3-4% nickel in the iron. Some laterites have more nickel than that, which is why (a) 8% (rather than 4%) is often considered a good rule of thumb to distinguish between ancient smelted nickel-iron and meteoric iron, and (b) people look at the nickel:cobalt ratio because that tends to be different for terrestrial vs meteoric (and Jambon has some nice graphs showing this (but his data doesn't include Anatolian ores)).

[A. G. Maisey]

This is very interesting technical information Timo, it is something that for the most part I do not know, in fact something I have not needed to know, my knowledge in this area deals with forge work, and I --- and I believe most other people involved with forge work --- tend to look at all the processes that produce the material with which we work, as "smelting". Obviously technically incorrect.

I had intended to stop posting to this thread, but your posts gave it a new life, well, at least for me they did.

However we've still got King Tut's dagger sitting in front of us, and if we can now accept that it is indeed meteoritic material, which it must be if the nickel content is as high as it is reported to be, then we really only have one question:-

prior to 1323BC who had the technology that could forge weld iron or could cast iron?

welding depends on heat and pressure, but in the absence of a massive power hammer, the heat needed to weld iron is around 2500F - 2600F

nickel will weld at a slightly lower temperature than iron

casting depends upon having liquid metal, iron will melt at about 2800F

Prior to 1323BC, when King Tutankhamen died, what people, anywhere in the world, had the technology that would provide temperatures in excess of 2500F?

If that question can be answered we will know where the King Tut dagger came from, if it cannot be answered all we can do is to speculate.

--- or maybe Erik von Daniken had the answer after all????

[David]

Originally Posted by motan

Hi David, I don"t want this to become too lengthy, but still..
Diplomatic relation between Hatti and Egypt certainly existed around that time. Suppiluliuma I, the contemporary Hittite king, wanted to wed his son to Tutankhamun's widow, but the boy died before it happened. The Hittite wanted a front against common enemies like the Hurrians and Mittani.

I believe i mentioned this before. But it was Tut's widow who instigated this conversation, not the other way around, as she was worried about what would happen and who she would be married off to after the death of Tut. This was considered an "unprecedented" move at the time. Yes, i am sure this would have been considered advantageous by Suppiluliuma at the time, but it was not his idea.
People keep talking about diplomacy between the Eqypt and the Hittites during King Tutankhamen's rule, but i have yet to see any evidence of that, "Great Power Club" not withstanding. Yes, i don't doubt that other pharaohs may have had such diplomatic relations with the Hittite, but we are trying to determine how this dagger ended up in Tut's tomb, not the tomb of any other pharaoh.