Five thousand-year-old Egyptian beads made out of meteorites were recently discovered, nature.com reported.
The beads are the oldest known artifacts from Egypt, dating back to 3,300 BC. They were discovered in 1911 in a Gerzeh cemetery, about 40 miles from Cairo.
The study was published in Meteoritics & Planetary Science stated that the findings explain how the Egyptians were able to use iron without the technology of iron smelting. Since the meteorite was used to make jewelry it was most likely a prized material in their culture.
"The sky was very important to the ancient Egyptians," said Joyce Tyldesley, an Egyptologist at the University of Manchester who is a co-author of the paper. "Something that falls from the sky is going to be considered as a gift from the gods."
In 1928, a study found large amounts of nickel in the artifacts, which suggested that they were made from meteorites. In the 1980s researchers argued that the nickel content wasn't as high as they had previously thought, and accidental smelting could have produced the low-levels of nickel that did exist.
In recent studies a team from Open University in the U.K. led by Diane Johnson, a meteorite scientist, used scanning electron microscopy along with computed tomography to take a closer look at the beads.
The team was not allowed cut the artifacts open and test the material, but they did find areas of a bead where the surface had been worn down. Johnson said they were like "little windows" to the testable metal beneath the exterior.
The Microscopy revealed that the nickel content was actually close to 30 percent, which is fairly high. The study also showed the material possessed a tell-tale crystalline structure called a Widmanstätten pattern. The pattern is only found in meteorites that have "cooled extremely slowly inside their parent asteroids as the Solar System was forming," according to nature.com.
Further tomography studies suggested that the Egyptians created the jewelry by hammering down the material and bending it into the tube-shaped bead.
"Iron was very strongly associated with royalty and power," Johnson said.
Iron was thought to help the owner pass through to the afterlife, it was also believed that the gods had bones made of iron.
Campbell Price, a curator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum who did not participate in the study speculated that ancient Egyptians could have seen falling meteorites as remains of the gods falling from the sky.
