I have seen a suggestion that the "thunderbolt" (as usually translated) that damaged the Sphinx, as mentioned on the "Inventory Stela", was a meteorite, which seems more plausible than the usual interpretation as a lightning strike. Ancient Egyptians understood that meteoritic iron, thus meteorites, came from the sky, although I don't think we know how they knew. Finding a meteorite to have knocked off part of the Sphinx would be pretty convincing to them.
Note that the dating of the Sphinx, implied by the Inventory Stela, as older than Khufu is pretty universally discounted by egyptologists as historical revisionism. I.e., when the stela was carved, apparently c. 1500 BC, its authors sought to mislead about events a thousand years earlier to make the Isis temple seem older than it was.
> Ancient Egyptians understood that meteoritic iron, thus meteorites, came from the sky, although I don't think we know how they knew.
The oldest evidence for this comes from a variety of very old texts carved into the tombs of the pyramids (called the Pyramid texts). The Egyptians conceived of the sky as being made of iron, above which was water. The oldest text, for instance, says that Unas (the Pharaoh), "will acquire the sky and splits its iron." But there are lots of other examples in the texts where the Egyptians make clear that the sky was made of iron.
For what it's worth we know that the Egyptians had meteoric iron and considered it to be valuable. King Tutankhamun, for instance, was buried with a dagger made of meteoric iron.
One of the more intriguing features around Egypt is the Gebel Kamil crater, which is an impact crater from a meteor 1.3 meters large that landed around 3000 BC, a few hundred miles to the west of the Nile in southern Egypt. It would easily have been visible to the ancient Egyptians in the sky when it fell. Amazingly, the site is so remote and meteorologically stable that it is the best preserved impact crater of its size on the planet, and it wasn't discovered until 2008 when someone stumbled across it on Google Earth.
[Shameless plug: if anyone is interesting in learning more, I recently wrapped up a three-episode series about Egyptian astronomy on my podcast about the history of astronomy: https://songofurania.com/episode/030]
It's hard for me to comprehend the odds that a meteorite would hit the Sphinx on the nose.
I know that the probability is higher that a meteorite would hit something of great cultural significance, and that perhaps the broken nose led to some of that significance. But it still seems really, really unlikely.
Isn't it a lot more likely that something routine cause the damage, and that a story was made up afterward?
Some of the first glass used in the world came from a zone in the Egyptian dessert where an impact melted the sand and it was basically a kind of jewel in ancient times
This is the first I've heard of anything knocking off part of the Sphinx. That would have be very disconcerting to the folks at the time I guess... Major show of disapproval by the gods, even if you do wind up with some iron.
> A single object made of meteoritic iron has been identified, an arrowhead with a mass of 2.9 g found in the 19th Century in the late Bronze Age (900–800 BCE)
A cool and important finding no doubt, but there are much more impressive examples. Tutankhamun's meteoric iron dagger is from several hundred years earlier and is longer than your forearm.
I don't know, I personally find this much more interesting a discovery than Tutankhamun's dagger.
While Tutankhamun's dagger is very much consistent with my understanding of history, this discovery pretty much upends it.
Tutankhamun was the king of one of the most powerful kingdoms of the peak of the late bronze age. Him having a dagger made out of meteoric iron does not surprise me in the least, as long as I'm aware that meteoric iron was a thing.
But what we have here is very surprising (for me at least) on two counts. First, it's an arrowhead discovered about 1600 km from its likely source, the place where a meteor fell a good 600 to 700 years prior.
Based on Ni–Ge concentrations and shielding derived from 26Al activity of the arrowhead, the Kaalijarv (Estonia) meteorite with a Bronze Age impact age (∼1500 BCE) appears to be a possible source candidate, implying a transport over ∼1600 km.
That would be pretty much "meh". But, but ... In the middle of this 6 or 7 centuries we have the bronze age collapse. You'd think trade ceased. With this discovery, it looks like trade continued quite ok.
The other thing that I found surprising was the reuse/recycling. When we think of weapons in antiquity we generally don't think of how hard it was to make metal weapons. Until now I didn't ever stop for a second to think what happened to arrows used in battles or hunts. I always assumed the archers would fire their arrows, then go get some other arrows. But with this discovery, I'm now thinking that people were actually going over the scene of a battle and retrieving all the arrows they could (most likely along with whatever other metal things they could find, like swords, shields, axes, helmets, spearheads). One could say that people valued meteoric iron more than the more common bronze, and this is possible. But unlikely. I think people were simply reusing everything that could be reused. And so an arrowhead could still be in use for hundreds of years. At least this particular arrowhead.
Isn't basically all iron from the bronze age meteoric? There isn't much telluric iron metal in the world, and smelting iron ore doesn't happen much until the drum roll iron age. If you're a bronze age craftsman looking to make something of iron (why, when you have bronze?), your best (practically only) source is meteoric iron.
I would think a society that has no access to iron except for the extremely occasional meteorite would use it for something less mundane than an arrowhead. Especially if it was transported many hundreds of kilometers from where it was found, this must have been a valued treasure.
[+] [-] angiosperm|2 years ago|reply
Note that the dating of the Sphinx, implied by the Inventory Stela, as older than Khufu is pretty universally discounted by egyptologists as historical revisionism. I.e., when the stela was carved, apparently c. 1500 BC, its authors sought to mislead about events a thousand years earlier to make the Isis temple seem older than it was.
[+] [-] antognini|2 years ago|reply
The oldest evidence for this comes from a variety of very old texts carved into the tombs of the pyramids (called the Pyramid texts). The Egyptians conceived of the sky as being made of iron, above which was water. The oldest text, for instance, says that Unas (the Pharaoh), "will acquire the sky and splits its iron." But there are lots of other examples in the texts where the Egyptians make clear that the sky was made of iron.
For what it's worth we know that the Egyptians had meteoric iron and considered it to be valuable. King Tutankhamun, for instance, was buried with a dagger made of meteoric iron.
One of the more intriguing features around Egypt is the Gebel Kamil crater, which is an impact crater from a meteor 1.3 meters large that landed around 3000 BC, a few hundred miles to the west of the Nile in southern Egypt. It would easily have been visible to the ancient Egyptians in the sky when it fell. Amazingly, the site is so remote and meteorologically stable that it is the best preserved impact crater of its size on the planet, and it wasn't discovered until 2008 when someone stumbled across it on Google Earth.
[Shameless plug: if anyone is interesting in learning more, I recently wrapped up a three-episode series about Egyptian astronomy on my podcast about the history of astronomy: https://songofurania.com/episode/030]
[+] [-] chmod600|2 years ago|reply
I know that the probability is higher that a meteorite would hit something of great cultural significance, and that perhaps the broken nose led to some of that significance. But it still seems really, really unlikely.
Isn't it a lot more likely that something routine cause the damage, and that a story was made up afterward?
[+] [-] pugworthy|2 years ago|reply
https://www.napoleon-series.org/faq/c_sphinx.html
Also amusingly enough, there is an asteroid named Sphinx (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/896_Sphinx)
[+] [-] jimmySixDOF|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Simon_O_Rourke|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcpackieh|2 years ago|reply
A cool and important finding no doubt, but there are much more impressive examples. Tutankhamun's meteoric iron dagger is from several hundred years earlier and is longer than your forearm.
[+] [-] doakes|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] credit_guy|2 years ago|reply
While Tutankhamun's dagger is very much consistent with my understanding of history, this discovery pretty much upends it.
Tutankhamun was the king of one of the most powerful kingdoms of the peak of the late bronze age. Him having a dagger made out of meteoric iron does not surprise me in the least, as long as I'm aware that meteoric iron was a thing.
But what we have here is very surprising (for me at least) on two counts. First, it's an arrowhead discovered about 1600 km from its likely source, the place where a meteor fell a good 600 to 700 years prior.
That would be pretty much "meh". But, but ... In the middle of this 6 or 7 centuries we have the bronze age collapse. You'd think trade ceased. With this discovery, it looks like trade continued quite ok.The other thing that I found surprising was the reuse/recycling. When we think of weapons in antiquity we generally don't think of how hard it was to make metal weapons. Until now I didn't ever stop for a second to think what happened to arrows used in battles or hunts. I always assumed the archers would fire their arrows, then go get some other arrows. But with this discovery, I'm now thinking that people were actually going over the scene of a battle and retrieving all the arrows they could (most likely along with whatever other metal things they could find, like swords, shields, axes, helmets, spearheads). One could say that people valued meteoric iron more than the more common bronze, and this is possible. But unlikely. I think people were simply reusing everything that could be reused. And so an arrowhead could still be in use for hundreds of years. At least this particular arrowhead.
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