He died more than 3 millennia ago, but his tomb was only discovered in the middle of the last century, even so, the mysterious child pharaoh Tutankhamun never ceases to amaze.
This time, it was a group of Italian and Egyptian scientists who discovered that Pharaoh Tutankhamun’s famous knife, which had been deposited on the dead man’s thigh, came from outer space.
Using images from an X-ray Fluorescence Spectrometer, a device that uses X-rays to excite chemical elements and thus determine their composition, the scientists concluded that the iron from the knife could only have hitched a ride on Earth in a meteorite.
Terran iron never has more than 4% nickel, while that of the pharaoh contained 11%. In addition, the amount of cobalt in the pharaoh’s weapon is a typical signature of a space metal.
The scientists went further and compared the metal of the knife with that of meteorites known in the region.
They found one with the same composition: the Kharga, which crashed on the Egyptian Mediterranean coast, 250 kilometers from Alexandria, and was only identified by scientists in the year 2000.
The new find added to a series of extraordinary facts about the pharaoh, who took power at the age of 9 and probably died at the age of 18. His body, discovered in 1925, and another surprise is that analysis of the mummy revealed that the body caught fire after death, possibly a spontaneous combustion triggered by some error in the chemical embalming process.
But the surprises don’t stop there. In 2016, scientists detected signs of a secret chamber in the tomb of the child pharaoh, and now they are searching for even more treasures.
