When archaeologists peered inside Tutankhamun’s tomb for the first time in the early 1920s, they found antechambers packed to the brim with thousands of artifacts: statues, furniture, jewelry, clothes, chariots, paintings. Among these possessions was an iron dagger — just over one foot in length and crafted from an iron meteorite — that would puzzle researchers for nearly a century.
It’s easy to see why the researchers might be confused. The Iron Age, a period when people across Europe, Asia and Africa began making tools from iron ore through a process called smelting, is generally thought to have begun no earlier than 1200 B.C. — some 150 years after King Tut’s death. If smelting was off the table, archaeologists wondered, how might the dagger have been made?
