So what? Iron meteorites differ from "normal" Earth rocks in several ways visually and they are denser [1]. All a Bonze Age group would need to learn is that rocks that look a certain way and weight a lot are good places to find iron. They don't need to know that they fell from the sky.

[1] https://geology.com/meteorites/meteorite-identification.shtm...

> “The main contribution of Jambon’s approach is that he has developed a method that allows us to test this hypothesis nondestructively,” says Martinón-Torres. Jambon was particularly interested in searching these artifacts for nickel, which is not found in smelted iron. By contrast, meteoritic iron is usually high in nickel and cobalt.

In the article, the author said archeologists:

> Humans didn’t really master the process and produce iron at a large scale until around 1200 B.C

and then she went to note

> Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun, who died in 1324 B.C., for example, was buried with an iron headrest....

> Egyptian hieroglyphics referred to iron as being “from the sky,”

So was headrest made out of an iron from a meteorite, or was it extracted from an ore on Earth (through smelting)?

Okay... that seems fair. But when was that Egytian reference made? Before 1200BC or before 1324BC?

To add more confusion, later in the article:

> It has been thought, for example, that the iron used by the Egyptians came from an early smelting industry in Anatolia, where the Hittites may have started to work iron as early as 1500 B.C.

To summarize based on my understanding:

1. Extracting iron from an ore did not happen at large scale until 1200BC

2. But some smelting started as early as 1500BC

3. Iron artifacts were recovered from pharaoh Tutankhamun who died in 1324BC had.

4. Numerous references to “falling from rhe sky” from numerous civilizations, including some “iron hunting” trading.

5. So were some of the early iron artifacts made out of iron meteorite or were they made out of an iron ore?

While the main objective seems “clear” to me, the whole article is too confusing and hard to follow through. If my summary is right, ugh, I advise everyone to writr the outline in bullet points.

(Incidentally, just noticed there’s a submission on writing essays on HN right now)

“Some archaeologists were skeptical, as they thought that the amount of nickel found in Bronze Age iron tools was too low to consider them of meteoritic origin,” he says. “But I’m a trained cosmochemist, so I knew the problem was just corrosion. And I was able to show—partly thanks to Morasko meteorite data—that nickel was leached away during corrosion.”

So there were probably multiple issues.

The history of Arctic peoples working extraterrestrial iron.

It's true arctic peoples used found iron which came from meteorites. Another item rare in the arctic and even more useful than iron was wood. Driftwood was prized for building since trees don't exist above the arctic circle.

After the alien bacteria took up residence in the human gut, it enhanced the human brain, creating the modern human.

Andromeda Strain 50,000 B.C. (2019)

published in a book 1400 years old

Or about nearly 2,000 years after "a new term for iron [was] developed [in Egyptian] which literally translates as ‘iron from the sky’." (http://www.ironfromthesky.org/?page_id=2 )

https://edition.cnn.com/2016/06/02/africa/king-tut-dagger-me...

AO has a better picture of the dagger, and mentions that the other two iron items in Tutankhamun's tomb were also likely of meteoric origin, and different meteors at that. The CNN article has an annoying auto-play video.

Was the Ancient Egyptian term for sky related to words for "heaven" (the domain of the gods, and/or the place to which souls travelled after death)??

Seems that if it were there's many possibly etymologies. The page linked appears tentative about it, which seems reasonable. For example a Pharoah who wanted iron for themselves could declare it "of the heavens, and so only to be used by Pharoahs", which would make it "heavenly" to a people who associated sky and heaven. Or, perhaps chondrite was seen, as it is by me, as looking like a piece of the Milky Way fell down - association with "sky" but for unscientific reasons. Or ...

I used Google Scholar to search for "iron from the sky", and read the documents which were free to read.

None answer your question directly. I got the impression that "heaven" was where the gods live. The http://www.ironfromthesky.org/?page_id=2 link I gave earlier says:

> They contain references to iron in numerous places, mainly featuring in funerary ceremonies, the reception of deceased kings to heaven and their subsequent life in heaven, as well as a specific association with the god Seth ... These dark, heavy, fossilised bones share strong visual similarity with desert-weathered iron meteorites; as such, they could be the source of inspiration for the Pyramid texts reference to the ‘iron bones of gods’.

I did not get a sense that it was restricted to a Pharaoh. The Atlas Obscura piece pointed out that the price of iron was 10x that of gold, so it had a price. It was also a burial good in graves other than that of a Pharoah. (Rich people, certainly.)

I also found https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/2397122/Vale... which talks about the Hittite phrases "They brought <<black iron>> of the sky from the sky" and "They brought iron from the sky", where "<<black iron>>" is the placeholder for Sumerogram AN.BAR GE, and is traditionally is interpreted as meteoric iron.

Since the Hittites were not Egyptian, and had a different religion, I don't think they would have picked up that word on the say-so of a Pharaoh. It's also different than the Egyptian word for "iron from the sky". Unfortunately, I can't find the page with that word; I just remember it begins with a "B".

No one mentioned chondrite. I see that the Camp Verde meteorite (coarse octahedrite) and the Winona meteorite (primitive achondrite) are two meteorites which have appeared in an archeological context.

> Other meteors have been located in ancient ruins of the Americas, as well as around the world, ranging in size from the three ounce Pojoaque meteorite, found in an ancient pottery bowl near Santa Fe, N.M., to the 3,407-pound Casas Grandes iron discovered in an Inca ruin near Chihuahua, Mexico. - https://web.archive.org/web/20110901053938/http://verdenews....

The Pojoaque meteorite is a pallasite.

None of these four are (if I understand correctly) chondrites. Given that chondrites are the most common meteorite, this suggests that they were not as significant in ancient cultures.

FWIW the chondrite thing v was just 'meteoric iron that looks to me a bit like stars/milky way'.

  "these coveted, precocious artifacts"
  should be
  "these coveted, precious artifacts"

  Ferrous metallurgy is the metallurgy of iron and its alloys.
  It began far back in prehistory. The earliest surviving iron
  artifacts, from the 4th millennium BC in Egypt, were made
  from meteoritic iron-nickel.[1]

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrous_metallurgy

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