Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcpackieh | Hacker News Reader

> A single object made of meteoritic iron has been identified, an arrowhead with a mass of 2.9 g found in the 19th Century in the late Bronze Age (900–800 BCE)

A cool and important finding no doubt, but there are much more impressive examples. Tutankhamun's meteoric iron dagger is from several hundred years earlier and is longer than your forearm.

View on HN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutankhamun%27s_meteoric_iron_...

I don't know, I personally find this much more interesting a discovery than Tutankhamun's dagger.

While Tutankhamun's dagger is very much consistent with my understanding of history, this discovery pretty much upends it.

Tutankhamun was the king of one of the most powerful kingdoms of the peak of the late bronze age. Him having a dagger made out of meteoric iron does not surprise me in the least, as long as I'm aware that meteoric iron was a thing.

But what we have here is very surprising (for me at least) on two counts. First, it's an arrowhead discovered about 1600 km from its likely source, the place where a meteor fell a good 600 to 700 years prior.

  Based on Ni–Ge concentrations and shielding derived from 26Al activity of the arrowhead, the Kaalijarv (Estonia) meteorite with a Bronze Age impact age (∼1500 BCE) appears to be a possible source candidate, implying a transport over ∼1600 km.

That would be pretty much "meh". But, but ... In the middle of this 6 or 7 centuries we have the bronze age collapse. You'd think trade ceased. With this discovery, it looks like trade continued quite ok.

The other thing that I found surprising was the reuse/recycling. When we think of weapons in antiquity we generally don't think of how hard it was to make metal weapons. Until now I didn't ever stop for a second to think what happened to arrows used in battles or hunts. I always assumed the archers would fire their arrows, then go get some other arrows. But with this discovery, I'm now thinking that people were actually going over the scene of a battle and retrieving all the arrows they could (most likely along with whatever other metal things they could find, like swords, shields, axes, helmets, spearheads). One could say that people valued meteoric iron more than the more common bronze, and this is possible. But unlikely. I think people were simply reusing everything that could be reused. And so an arrowhead could still be in use for hundreds of years. At least this particular arrowhead.

My impression is that bronze production was heavily reliant on long trade-routes because although copper could be found all over the place, tin was only found in a few places. There is also arsenic bronze, arsenic often being coincident with copper with is convenient for making bronze without extensive trade routes, but regardless my impression is that Bronze Age and trade routes go hand-in-hand.

For me, the dagger is most impressive because it would have required extraordinary craftmanship to pull off; meteoric iron is much trickier to work than normal iron, particularly if you can't get it up to welding temperatures. From what I've seen in videos of people today trying to work with it, it has a tendency to split apart and crumble when hammered, so smaller pieces are much easier to produce than large pieces. And for an ironworker to be experienced enough to create that dagger, suggests there were a lot more meteoric iron artifacts being made. It was probably an artisan's masterpiece, but there must have been many more works that preceded it.

> You'd think trade ceased. With this discovery, it looks like trade continued quite ok.

Why? A great reduction in trade doesn’t mean it no longer existed at all.. it’s not 1 or 0.

Isn't basically all iron from the bronze age meteoric? There isn't much telluric iron metal in the world, and smelting iron ore doesn't happen much until the drum roll iron age. If you're a bronze age craftsman looking to make something of iron (why, when you have bronze?), your best (practically only) source is meteoric iron.

The catch is that the iron age happened at different times in different places. When that Egyptian dagger was likely made, people were already smelting iron in India and sub-Saharan Africa. Chemical analysis can rule that out though, lots of nickel and very little carbon indicate that it came from a meteorite.

No. Iron has been smelted in Anatolia since 2500 BC. It was initially believe that this iron must have been meteoric, but isotonic analysis done in the last few decades has shown that much of this early iron is in fact non-meteoric.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com