Meteorites in history and religion
For thousands of years, stones that fell from the sky were treated as messages from the gods.
Long before anyone knew what a meteorite was, people who saw a fireball and found a black stone where it landed drew the obvious conclusion: it had come from the heavens. Across the world, such stones were kept in temples, carried in processions, buried with the dead and hammered into sacred objects.
Iron meteorites were especially precious. For most of human history they were the only source of metallic iron, because nobody yet knew how to smelt iron from ore. Beads, blades and tools made from meteoritic iron have been found from Egypt to Greenland to North America.
Science came late to the story. Until about 1800, most European scholars refused to believe that stones could fall from the sky, and reports from farmers and villagers were dismissed as superstition. It took a series of well-witnessed falls, the work of the physicist Ernst Chladni, and the great fall at L'Aigle in France in 1803 to change their minds.
The stories in this section follow meteorites through that long history: as objects of worship, as treasures, as weapons, and finally as some of the most valuable samples in science.