CAIRO, Egypt — A team of Japanese and Egyptian researchers has been able to establish the source of King Tutankhamun’s mysterious iron meteorite dagger. The scientists, who conducted a non-destructive chemical analysis of the artifact at the Egyptian Museum of Cairo, determined that the object was most probably crafted at a low temperature from an octahedrite, the most common class of meteoric rock. They have also revealed that the short knife was in all likelihood a gift that came to Egypt from Mitanni, in Anatolia, according to a recently published study.

When British egyptologist Howard Carter first entered the tomb of Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings in 1922, he found a chamber densely packed with objects piled up in great disarray. Among them lay a well-preserved dagger with a double-edged iron blade. It had a roughly polished surface, a prominent crack and a hilt made primarily of gold. The object's origin and manufacture quickly became an enigma, as researchers were uncertain if the technology to make a dagger from meteoric iron existed in the 18th Dynasty of ancient Egypt.

Tutankhamun reigned from 1361 to 1352 BC, the Late Bronze Age. This period precedes the time when people acquired iron processing technology and its use spread, known as the Iron Age, which is generally thought to have begun about a century and a half later, the study notes. But the high quality of the object indicated that the skill to work meteoritic iron in particular was well established wherever it was manufactured, so its origin and production method have attracted the attention of researchers for decades.

Tomoko Arai, the author of the study, is a lunar and planetary scientist at the Chiba Institute of Technology’s Planetary Exploration Research Centre in Japan. “The origin of Tut’s iron dagger is important because it directly affects the widely accepted history of human civilization from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age,” she told Al-Monitor.