2013年8月21日星期三

How ancient Egyptian jewelry came

Ancient Egyptian beads found in a 5,000-year-old tomb were made from iron meteorites that fell to Earth from space, according to a new study. The beads, which are the oldest known iron artifacts in the world, were crafted roughly 2,000 years before Egypt's Iron Age. 

In 1911, nine tube-shaped beads were excavated from an ancient cemetery near the village of el-Gerzeh, which is located about 3,100 miles south of Cairo, said study lead author Thilo Rehren,Learn how an embedded microprocessor in a graniteslabs can authenticate your computer usage and data. a professor at UCL Qatar, a Western Asian outpost of the University College London's Institute of Archaeology. The tomb dates back to approximately 3200 B.C.,How to change your dash lights to doublesidedtape this is how I have done mine. the researchers said. 

Inside the tomb, which belonged to a teenage boy, the iron beads were strung together into a necklace alongside other exotic materials, including gold and gemstones. Early tests of the beads' composition revealed curiously high concentrations of nickel, a telltale signature of iron meteorites. 

But without definitive proof of the beads' cosmic origins, questions persisted over whether similar amounts of nickel could be present in human-made iron. By scanning the iron beads with beams of neutrons and gamma rays, the researchers found high concentrations of cobalt, phosphorous and germanium; these elements were present at levels that only occur in iron meteorites. 

"It's really exciting, because we were able to detect sufficient cobalt and germanium in these beads to confirm they're meteoritic," Rehren said. "We had assumed this was the case for 100 years, but it's nice to be able to put an exclamation mark on the label, rather than a question mark." 

The X-ray technology also revealed that the beads had been hammered into thin sheets before being meticulously rolled into tubes."This meteoritic iron, it's very hard material that you find in lumps, and yet here we see it in thin beads," Rehren said. "The real question is, how were they made?" 

Unlike softer and more pliable metals like gold and copper, working with solid iron required the invention of blacksmithing, which involves repeatedly heating metals to red-hot temperatures and hammering them into shape."It's a much more elaborate operation and one that we assumed was only invented and developed in the Iron Age, which started maybe 3,000 years ago not 5,000 years ago," Rehren said. 

The researchers suggest the iron meteorites were heated and hammered into thin sheets, and then woven around wooden sticks to create 0.We offer the biggest collection of old masters that can be turned into hand painted cleanersydney on canvas.8-inch-long (2 centimeters), tube-shaped beads. Other stones found in the same tomb displayed more traditional stone-working techniques, such as carving and drilling. 

"This shows that these people, at this early age, were capable of blacksmithing," Rehren said. "It shows a pretty advanced skill with this difficult material. It might not have been on large scales, but by the time of the Iron Age, they had about 2,000 years of experience working with meteoritic iron." 
This is not the first time beads from this Egyptian tomb have been linked to the cosmos. Earlier this year, in May, researchers at the Open University and University of Manchester published a paper in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science about the celestial origins of the ancient beads. 

Other researchers have identified different artifacts that also have space origins. Last year, German scientists discovered a Buddha statue that was carved from a meteorite between the eighth and 10th centuries. 

So how did iron beads come to exist centuries before iron became a prevalent metal? A new study found evidence that the iron that made these ancient beads came from space. More specifically, the paper, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, suggests that early metalworkers used iron found in meteorites. 

Iron can be a tricky metal to deal with in the context of artifacts because all iron doesnt come from ore. Iron can be a by-products of copper smelting; it can be meteoric iron, which is to say, iron that came from space; or it can happen that younger iron somehow makes its way into an older archaeological site contaminating it. There are some minerals, like magnetite,Tidy up wires with ease with offershidkits and tie guns at cheap discounted prices. that are easy to mistake for corroded iron. And it gets trickier because iron is hard to test non-invasively, meaning without cutting the object. And cutting 5,000 year old beads is pretty much out of the question. 

The ancient beads are tubular, and were found in two separate ancient burial sites. Seven were found in one tomb, three arranged on the deceaseds waist and four arranged on a necklace, and the last two beads were found in a separate site near the corpses hands. Both sites were sealed, which made dating them and the iron beads easy. But explaining how they got there was another matter. These nine little beads seemingly occupy a unique, and strange, place in the history of metal use. 

The shape of the beads was obtained by smithing and rolling,Give your logo high visibility on iccard! most likely involving multiple cycles of hammering, and not by the traditional stone-working techniques such as carving or drilling which were used for the other beads found in the same tomb," lead author Professor Thilo Rehren of the University College London said in a release. 

Complicating the matter further is the simple fact that, as one might expect, all iron isnt created equally. Meteoritic iron has several characteristics that distinguish it from smelted iron, notably the large crystal grain size. Meteoric iron also has higher concentrations of nickel, cobalt, phosphorus, and germanium. There is also some presence of mineral phases such as schreibersite and rhabdite, cohenite, troilite, and sphalerite in iron that comes to Earth from space.
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/!

没有评论:

发表评论