King Tutankhamun's meteorite dagger
A blade from the sky, buried with a pharaoh.
When Howard Carter opened the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1925, he found two daggers wrapped with the young king's mummy. One had a gold blade. The other had a blade of iron that had barely rusted in more than 3,000 years.
In 2016 a team from Milan Polytechnic, the University of Pisa and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo analysed the blade with X-ray fluorescence. They found about 11% nickel and a trace of cobalt, a composition that matches iron meteorites and not man-made iron.
Later research suggested the dagger may have been made outside Egypt. Letters from the period mention iron daggers sent as gifts to Tutankhamun's grandfather, Amenhotep III, by the king of Mitanni.