Scientists have confirmed that a dagger found in Tutankhamun’s tomb was fashioned from a meteorite. This suggests that the boy king was living exactly like any teenaged boy who found himself king, acquiring as many totally fucking metal toys as possible.
That’s according to the CBC:
An analysis of the dagger’s blade led by Daniela Comelli, a professor of materials science at the Polytechnic University of Milan in Italy, showed that it contains 10 per cent nickel and 0.6 per cent cobalt, the researchers report in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science.
The analysis was conducted using a technique called X-ray fluorescence, which identifies different elements from the characteristic colours of X-ray light they give off when hit with higher-energy X-rays. Then they compared the composition of the dagger’s blade with that of 11 metallic meteorites and found it to be very similar.
Fucking sick, dude.
Naturally, the dagger had been thoroughly tricked out: “It had a decorated gold handle with a pommel of rock crystal, and the iron blade was protected with a gold sheath decorated with a pattern of lilies on one side, feathers on the other, and a jackal’s head.”
Sweet.