{"it":{"id":"W11A13","kind":"artifact","sub":"Authenticated","name":"Tutankhamun iron dagger","place":"Cairo","mat":"meteoritic iron, gold hilt","dims":"34.2 cm overall (Comelli 2016) vs about 35.2 cm (Matsui 2022); blade about 21.8 cm","loc":"Egyptian Museum Cairo (per Global Egyptian Museum record)","acc":"JE 61585A-B","find":"KV62, Howard Carter 1925, in wrappings","flag":"genuine ancient","src":[82,83,84,461],"lat":30.048,"lon":31.234,"tags":[],"sum":"When Howard Carter unwrapped Tutankhamun in 1925, he found two daggers: a gold one on the abdomen and one with an iron blade on the right thigh, in a gold hilt with a rock crystal pommel. In 2016 Daniela Comelli's team measured 10.8% nickel and 0.58% cobalt in the blade, and in 2022 Takafumi Matsui's team measured 11.8% nickel. Both teams say the iron came from a meteorite.","why":"It was made before the usual start of the Iron Age, when iron was a precious rarity in Egypt. Matsui's team proposes it was a gift from Mitanni, while Albert Jambon says nothing shows where the blade was made.","nfacts":0,"nsrc":4,"yt":"Read the nickel-content analysis of the blade.","rel":["W15A04"],"hook":"Carter found two daggers in Tutankhamun's wrappings: gold at the belly, iron on the right thigh.","date":"found 1925; made 14th century BCE"},"S":{"82":["Wikipedia Tut dagger","https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tutankhamun's_meteoric_iron_dagger&oldid=1373343452"],"83":["Comelli et al 2016 MAPS 51(7)","https://doi.org/10.1111/maps.12664"],"84":["Global Egyptian Museum record JE 61585A-B","https://globalegyptianmuseum.org/detail.aspx?id=15090"],"461":["Wikipedia: Tutankhamun's meteoric iron dagger","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutankhamun's_meteoric_iron_dagger"]},"rec":{"id":"W11A13","alias":[],"ms":[],"lab":[{"k":"Materials","v":"meteoritic Fe-Ni-Co blade; gold hilt; rock crystal pommel","b":"V","s":["W11S15","W11S16"],"url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tutankhamun's_meteoric_iron_dagger&oldid=1373343452"},{"k":"Lab test","mat":"Ni content","v":"10.8 +/- 0.3 wt%","m":"portable XRF, external calibration (11 steels, 11 meteorites)","by":"Comelli et al 2016","b":"V","s":["W11S16","W11S15"],"url":"https://doi.org/10.1111/maps.12664"},{"k":"Lab test","mat":"Co content","v":"0.58 +/- 0.04 wt%","m":"portable XRF","by":"Comelli et al 2016","b":"V","s":["W11S16","W11S15"],"url":"https://doi.org/10.1111/maps.12664"},{"k":"Lab test","mat":"Ni/Co ratio","v":"~20 (meteorites avg 18+/-2)","m":"derived","by":"Comelli et al 2016","b":"S","s":["W11S16"],"url":"https://doi.org/10.1111/maps.12664"},{"k":"Lab test","mat":"Terrestrial pre-19th c. iron Ni ceiling (comparison)","v":"<=4 wt%","m":"literature (Tylecote 1992)","by":"Comelli et al 2016","b":"V","s":["W11S16","W11S15"],"url":"https://doi.org/10.1111/maps.12664"},{"k":"Lab test","mat":"Composition (museum record)","v":"~97% Fe, ~3% Ni","m":"not stated (older analysis)","by":"Global Egyptian Museum record","b":"S","s":["W11S35"],"url":"https://globalegyptianmuseum.org/detail.aspx?id=15090"}],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA166","a":"Otherworldly/meteoric metal","who":"popular claims","main":"Meteoritic iron: Fe + 10.8+/-0.3 wt% Ni, 0.58+/-0.04 Co (Comelli 2016)","ms":"W11S15;W11S16;W11S35","st":"supported-explained","n":"Status 'supported-explained': the claimed fact (blade is meteoritic iron) is confirmed by Comelli 2016, but that IS the mainstream explanation; no unexplained anomaly remains. A 97% Fe/3% Ni figure in the GEM record conflicts with Comelli 10.8% Ni and is kept as a separate lab row.","nl":"1"}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"art":{"claimed_anomaly":"Otherworldly/meteoric metal","mainstream_reading":"Meteoritic iron: Fe + 10.8+/-0.3 wt% Ni, 0.58+/-0.04 Co (Comelli 2016)","provenance_flag":"genuine ancient","current_location":"Egyptian Museum Cairo (per Global Egyptian Museum record)","find_circumstances":"KV62, Howard Carter 1925, in wrappings","claimant":"popular claims","status":"supported-explained","dimensions":"blade length ~not in source","material":"meteoritic iron, gold hilt","date":"","culture":"","museum_accession":"JE 61585A-B","b":"V","s":["W11S15","W11S16","W11S35"]},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"W11S15","t":"Wikipedia Tut dagger","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tutankhamun's_meteoric_iron_dagger&oldid=1373343452"},{"id":"W11S16","t":"Comelli et al 2016","u":"https://doi.org/10.1111/maps.12664"},{"id":"W11S35","t":"Global Egyptian Museum record","u":"https://globalegyptianmuseum.org/detail.aspx?id=15090"},{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia: Tutankhamun's meteoric iron dagger","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutankhamun's_meteoric_iron_dagger"},{"id":"VW11A13-5","t":"Comelli et al. 2016, Tutankhamun’s iron dagger (Meteoritics & Planetary Science, PDF)","u":"https://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/iss/kap_a/articles/tuts_dagger_2016.pdf"}],"qs":["Egyptians later called it \"iron of the sky\". Did they know where Tutankhamun's blade came from when it was made?","Was the dagger forged in Egypt, or was it a royal gift like the iron Tushratta sent to Amenhotep III?","Is a meteorite dagger more or less wondrous than the legends people tell about it?"],"article":{"id":"W11A13","mode":"rewrite-plus-quick-research","research":"quick","title":"Tutankhamun’s iron dagger: a blade from the sky","dek":"The boy king was buried with an iron dagger at a time when iron was rarer than gold. Two scientific teams have now shown the metal fell from space, and they disagree about who forged it.","byline":"The Nommo","updated":"1 Nov 2026","sections":[{"h":"The strangest true fact","p":["Tucked into the wrappings of Tutankhamun’s mummy was a knife made from a meteorite [1].","Its blade had barely rusted when Howard Carter found it in 1925, and photographs taken in 2020 show it has hardly changed since [2].","For a 3,300 year old piece of iron, that is close to a small miracle of chemistry, and the nickel that came with it from space is part of the reason [1] [2]."]},{"h":"What it is and why it matters","p":["The dagger is a double edged iron blade set in a hilt made mostly of gold [2].","The gold handle is decorated with cloisonné and fine granulation and ends in a pommel of rock crystal, and its gold sheath carries a lily pattern on one side and feathers on the other, ending in a jackal’s head [1].","It now sits in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo under inventory number JE 61585A-B [5].","It matters because it was made about a century and a half before the date usually given for the start of the Iron Age, which Matsui’s team places after 1200 BC [2].","At that time, says the museum’s own catalogue, Egypt still relied on copper for its weapons, which made a blade like this a precious rarity [5]."]},{"h":"Key facts and measurements","p":["The two published measurements of its length differ slightly: 34.2 cm for the whole dagger according to Comelli’s team, and about 35.2 cm according to Matsui’s team, who give about 21.8 cm for the blade and 13.4 cm for the hilt [1] [2].","The blade thins from about 2 mm at the centre to under 1 mm at the edges, and one face carries a winding crack about 5 cm long [2].","The nickel figures disagree, starting with an X ray fluorescence study in 1994 found 2.8% nickel and judged the blade not meteoritic, as Comelli’s team reports [1].","The museum catalogue gives about 97% iron and 3% nickel [5].","Comelli’s team, calibrating against 11 steels and 11 known meteorites, measured 10.8% nickel and 0.58% cobalt in 2016 [1].","Matsui’s team measured 11.8% nickel in 2022 [2].","The difference matters because iron smelted from earthly ore before the 19th century never carries more than 4% nickel, while most iron meteorites hold between 5% and 35%, according to Comelli’s team [1]."]},{"h":"How it was found","p":["Carter found two daggers in the mummy’s wrappings in 1925, one with a gold blade on the abdomen and one with an iron blade on the right thigh [1].","The iron one was registered as Carter number 256K [1].","It was not alone: the tomb also held sixteen miniature iron blades, a small iron headrest and an iron eye amulet on a bracelet [1].","For decades the blade’s origin stayed unsettled, because an early analysis from 1970 was never published and the 1994 reading pointed the other way [1].","In 2016 Daniela Comelli of the Politecnico di Milano and colleagues took a portable X ray machine into the Cairo museum and scanned the blade without touching it [1].","In February 2020 a Japanese team led by Takafumi Matsui returned with a scanner that could map elements across the surface in two dimensions [2] [3]."]},{"h":"The strongest alternative case","p":["The real alternative on offer is narrower and better supported: that the dagger was not Egyptian work at all [2].","The Amarna letters, the diplomatic archive of the period, list iron gifts sent by Tushratta, king of Mitanni, to Amenhotep III, who may have been Tutankhamun’s grandfather [1].","In Moran’s translation quoted by Matsui’s team, one entry describes a dagger whose blade is of iron, with a gold guard and a pommel of stone [2].","Matsui’s team found a few per cent of calcium, without sulfur, on the gold hilt, which they read as lime plaster used to fix the decorations [2].","Since lime plaster came into use in Egypt only in the Ptolemaic period, starting in 305 BC, they propose the dagger may have come from Mitanni [2] [3]."]},{"h":"The mainstream case","p":["On the metal itself the two teams agree: the blade was hammered out of an iron meteorite [1] [2].","Comelli’s team points to the ratio of nickel to cobalt, about 20, which matches meteorites and the chemistry of the early solar system [1].","They searched all known iron meteorites within 2,000 km of the Red Sea and found only one close match, the Kharga meteorite found in Egypt in 2000, with 11.77% nickel and 0.437% cobalt [1].","Matsui’s team adds that nickel maps show bands about 1 mm wide in a cubic pattern, which they identify as the Widmanstätten pattern of a type of meteorite called an octahedrite [2].","They also found black spots that they read as the remains of iron sulfide grains, which would have melted above about 950 °C, so they conclude the smith forged the blade at lower heat [2].","For Comelli’s team, a blade this fine is evidence of skilled iron smithing in Egypt in the 14th century BCE [1]."]},{"h":"What’s unexplained","p":["The French geochemist Albert Jambon has challenged the 2022 study [4].","He notes that the measurements had no reference standards, and that a pattern 1 mm wide cannot be resolved by a map taken in steps of 0.9 mm [4].","He suggests the calcium on the hilt is probably an artefact of the measurement, since it shows up on the blade and other objects too [4].","Because the hilt and blade may not share an origin, Jambon concludes there is no clue to where the blade was made [4].","So the question of Egyptian or foreign craftsmanship is open.","Even the word is a puzzle: a new Egyptian term meaning iron of the sky appears in the 19th Dynasty, after Tutankhamun’s death, and Comelli’s team reads it as a sign that Egyptians knew where such iron came from [1].","Whether the king’s own smiths knew it a generation earlier, nobody can yet say."]},{"h":"Related places","p":["Tutankhamun’s tomb held another gift from the sky: compare the pectoral scarab carved from Libyan Desert Glass.","For other ancient objects that seem ahead of their time, see the Nimrud lens and the Baghdad battery."]},{"h":"A thought to leave with","p":["Somewhere in the eastern Sahara, perhaps, lies the crater or the scattered field that gave up this iron [1].","If Jambon is right that the blade and the hilt tell separate stories, the dagger may hold two journeys: one from space to the desert, and one from a forge nobody has located to a boy king’s thigh [4]."]}],"sources":[{"n":1,"text":"Comelli, Daniela, and 12 coauthors, “The meteoritic origin of Tutankhamun’s iron dagger blade”, Meteoritics and Planetary Science 51 (2016), authors’ accepted postprint via the University of Pisa repository (peer reviewed)","url":"https://arpi.unipi.it/bitstream/11568/794614/7/2016MAPSPostPrint.pdf"},{"n":2,"text":"Matsui, Takafumi, Ryota Moriwaki, Eissa Zidan and Tomoko Arai, “The manufacture and origin of the Tutankhamen meteoritic iron dagger”, Meteoritics and Planetary Science 57 (2022), open access under a Creative Commons licence, read via a hosted copy of the published PDF (peer reviewed)","url":"https://egittolizzando.altervista.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/The-manufacture-and-origin-of-the-Tutankhamen-meteoritic-iron-dagger.pdf"},{"n":3,"text":"Planetary Exploration Research Center, Chiba Institute of Technology, press release on the Matsui study, 14 February 2022 (in Japanese; university)","url":"https://www.perc.it-chiba.ac.jp/news/2022/02/14/1636/"},{"n":4,"text":"Jambon, Albert, “A comment to: The manufacture and origin of the Tutankhamun meteoritic iron dagger by Matsui et al.”, Meteoritics and Planetary Science (2022), abstract only, read via the Crossref record (peer reviewed comment)","url":"https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1111/maps.13942"},{"n":5,"text":"Global Egyptian Museum, “Dagger and Sheath of King Tutankhamun”, Egyptian Museum Cairo, inventory JE 61585A-B, catalogue entry","url":"https://globalegyptianmuseum.org/detail.aspx?id=15090"}],"source_note":"Record figures checked against opened sources. Kept: two daggers found in 1925, iron on the right thigh and gold on the abdomen; rock crystal pommel; 10.8% nickel and 0.58% cobalt; Kharga meteorite at 11.77% nickel and 0.437% cobalt within 10%; Gerzeh beads of about 3200 BCE; Tushratta’s iron gifts to Amenhotep III; “iron of the sky” in the 19th Dynasty (all Comelli). The museum’s 97% iron and 3% nickel is kept as the museum states it, beside the 1994 reading of 2.8% nickel reported by Comelli, and the 2016 (10.8%) and 2022 (11.8%) readings. Overall length shown side by side: 34.2 cm (Comelli) and about 35.2 cm (Matsui). Jambon is used only for what his abstract states. Wikipedia sources from the record are dropped.","related":["W15A04","W11A06","W11A02"]}},"img":null,"md":{"h":"img/m/W11A13-16x9.webp","w":1600,"hh":900,"alt":"Tutankhamun iron dagger, Cairo — Eisendolch aus dem Grab des Tutanchamun, gefunden zwischen den Mumienbinden am rechten Oberschenkel des Königs…","by":"Olaf Tausch","lic":"CC BY 3.0","lu":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0","p":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kairo_Museum_Eisendolch_Tutanchamun_01.jpg","g":false,"ct":true,"cap":"","sec":[]},"hh":[{"v":"Meteoritic","h":"Blade iron’s nickel content and homogeneity match meteorites","s":[192]},{"v":"c. 1334–1325","u":"BC","h":"Reign of Tutankhamun, in whose tomb it was found","s":[192]},{"v":"Meteoritic iron","h":"Made of: Meteoritic iron, gold hilt","s":[193]},{"v":"KV62","h":"Where it was found: KV62, Howard Carter 1925, in wrappings","s":[193]}],"hs":{"192":["Wikipedia: Tutankhamun's meteoric iron dagger (and sources cited there)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutankhamun%27s_meteoric_iron_dagger"],"193":["Wikipedia Tut dagger","https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tutankhamun's_meteoric_iron_dagger&oldid=1373343452"]}}