Found in King Tut's tomb, the weapon's origin and how it was made has confused researchers since it was forged from an iron meteorite.
Four years later, aided by the Grand Egyptian Museum’s conservation center, Matsui and his colleagues used a portable scanning X-ray fluorescence instrument to map out the elements on the surface of the blade; not just iron, nickel and cobalt, but also chlorine and manganese, among others.
And just as informative as the abundance of these elements is their arrangement. “In some places, discontinuous banded arrangements with cubic symmetry and bandwidth of about 1 [millimeter] are observed,” the authors wrote. This three-dimensional, cross-hatched texture, known as a, occurs in some meteorites if their iron-nickel mixtures separate into bands upon cooling.
This was somewhat surprising. After all, much like smelting, the use of lime plaster in ancient Egypt only began to take off after King Tut's death, during the Ptolemaic period. Both iron processing technology and lime plaster, however, were already prevalent in the northerly Mitanni and Hittite regions.
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