“The earliest iron artefacts ever found — funeral beads strung around bodies in a 5,000-year-old Egyptian cemetery — were made from a meteorite, archaeologists said on Monday. The nine small beads come from two burial sites dated to around 3,200 BC, where they were found in necklaces along with exotic terrestrial minerals such as lapis lazuli, agate and gold. X-ray scanners, meanwhile, showed that the meteorite iron had been repeatedly heated and hammered to make the precious jewels for the afterlife. This shows that in the fourth millennium BC, the Egyptians were already advanced in the art in smithing, say the researchers.”
