Author writes, “Iron - at this time in history probably only available from meteorites - was a valuable and restricted commodity.”
So I wonder about why iron wasn’t available, but mostly I wonder where were people finding meteorites? Did people know where to look for them? If so can I go looking for them? That can’t be right. Or have all the easy to find meteorites already been nabbed? I thought meteorites were super rare and therefore treated more like the Kaaba.
Iron wasn’t available because it was combined with oxygen into rust, and other ores. It was around, just not usable by populations that didn’t know how to extract pure iron from the ores. Iron meteorites formed without all that pesky oxygen to deal with and so remain in pure state (along with lots of nickel) and remain in that state until they hit the ground on Earth and begin rusting away.
I don’t know if ancient peoples "knew where to look for meteorites, as much as recognizing the value of them when they were found. Remnant stone-age groups were using meteoritic iron even in very recent times–the natives of Greenland were using some large ones for iron tools up until Robert Peary stole them and sold them to the American Museum of Natural History.
Iron isn’t available in metal form in the Earth’s crust and has to be extracted from ores using relatively high temperatures.
And I expect people found meteorites mainly through random chance, stumbling across weird heavy “rocks”. There weren’t a lot of them found back then though, at least iron objects from that era are super rare.
As for where to find meteorites, they fall anywhere and everywhere. Mostly that means in the ocean or low-populated areas, because that is the majority of the Earth, but still every year multiple witnessed falls happen on populated areas. That’s the first way to find meteorites–know where they fell, and go looking for them.
If a meteorite isn’t witnessed to fall and collected immediately, then it becomes subject to the same weathering and oxygen that keeps from there being many lumps of pure native iron around, and meteorites weather away more quickly than native rock, because when the iron in them is exposed to oxygen (and especially oxygen dissolved in water) and rusts, it swells, cracking and crumbling the meteorite, exposing more surface to weathering. So the second place to look for meteorites is in places with as little rain as possible, meaning deserts. The meteorites don’t fall more often there, but they survive longer, sometimes thousands of years with little alteration.
But if you are in the desert looking for meteorites, you need to be in the right kind of desert–hard pan desert without dunes to cover them and without lots of native black rocks to confuse them with–there might be meteorites there, but you would have a hell of a time picking out the needles in a needlestack.
Back in the late 1990s is when people really realized this and started extensively searching suitable deserts, especially the northern Sahara. There, in the last 20 years or so there have been more than 12,000 officially numbered finds–one of the finds may be a single piece, or it may be a recongized grouping of up to hundreds or thousands of pieces from the same fall. Many tens of thousands of individual pieces have been collected (and sold) from Northwest Africa. 10 years ago there was such a glut on the market that I bought common type but nice quality meteorites for as little as seven cents per gram.
(Glad I was breaking dow my message in parts–server ate the latest one so I’m redoing it off-line.)
(Contrast that with a modern witnessed fall, where even common types can sell for $50, $100, or even more per gram.) The pickings are getting slim there now, but I gather that in the first few years of the rush, finding meteorites basicly boiled down to knowing what looked like and walking for a few miles in the desert looking down. Meteorites from most all classifications have been found in the deserts of Africa, including lunar and Martian ones, but one class is conspicuously under-represented–there is a much lower proportion iron meteorites than you find elsewhere. Which means that they were most likely collected and used for tool-making over the past thousands of years while the other types were left to accumulate.
But meteorites are also found in other deserts of the world, including the US, and by the same method–start walking and looking for rocks that look like meteorites. Here are US finds, ordered by the most recent. Note how many come from less-than-humid locations. Some of the US desert meteorites are found by prospectors looking for gold–for example, these. (Another interesting US desert find is Los Angeles, interesting to anyone because it is Martian, interesting to me because I have a tiny fragment of it.) Of course, there are still old meteorites found in places that aren’t deserts, such as this one from Nebraska that I chose at random with no ulterior motive at all.
BTW, this is what a very fresh, fusion-crusted meteorite looks like sitting on the ground. Pretty obvious in a desert location like that. In a very dry hard-pan desert, it could look pretty much the same for hundreds or even thousands of years. Some place with lots of rain, not so much. Here are a few more accounts of meteorite searches. Other searches cangolesswell.
Interesting. But how would an Egyptian smith turn that into something useful, like a knife blade, if the melting point is so high?
Trivia: Terry Pratchett smelted his own sword from iron he found on his property, including some meteorite iron. HM graciously used the sword to dub him Sir Terry.
A meteorite buried in the desert could remain primarily solid nickle/iron for a very long time. And folks have been walking around in the desert for a long time. On that timescale, dunes move around covering and uncovering desert pavement, and probably iron meteorites. As a long term picker up of neat rocks, I guarantee, I would have kept a meteorite even if I didn’t know what it was.
When the bronze age finally came up, some of those neat rocks would have been shown to bronzw workers, and eventually at least one would have tried to work it, recognizing it as some sort of metal.
An iron hammer would almost instantly become an exceptionally valuable tool. A larger iron hammer would have been instantly nearly legendary. Cold wrought iron would become a supernatural material, able to kill supernatural beings. Find a dozen or so each millennium , and the very best of smiths would have time to experiment with them. A sword fit for a king turns into a sword that makes someone a king.
AIUI, the problem is heat. The temperature needed to extract iron from ore is higher than the temperature needed work that iron into something useful. Iron oxide becomes metallic iron at roughly 1250° C (2282° F or 1523.15 K) Meteorites being metallic iron from the start need a lower temperature to be workable.
I believe the iron blades or spikes the Inuit and their predecessors made were considerably smaller than the Egyptian dagger, perhaps a few centimetres across at the most.
The West Greenlanders also used another source of unoxidised iron; it occurred in pea sized lumps in bedrock on Disko Island.
Also, with the Tut knife, there might have been the advantage of having access to small pieces close to the size of the knife in the first place, while the Greenlanders were stuck with breaking thinner bits off of the much larger known pieces. Some iron meteorites break into thousands of potentially useful small bits while others remain mostly in less-managable biglumps. (If there were ever many useful small pieces of Cape York, they were either used long ago or haven’t yet been found.)
And even a lot of mined iron ore is ultimately meteoric in origin. Most of the Earth’s own iron sank down into the core while the planet was still molten.
IIRC, the bulk of the world’s supply of nickel comes from a single mine in Canada, on the site of an ancient asteroid impact.