King Tut's Space Dagger
Exhibit 003: Forged in the fires of a dying star
Welcome to the Museum of Cosmic Curiosities, a growing collection of strange objects, forgotten artefacts and obscure relics from the history of astronomy and space exploration. Some are profound, some are absurd, but they all have a story to tell.
🏛️ Exhibit 003 - King Tut’s Space Dagger
Working by candlelight, shadows dance on the ancient walls as you tiptoe down the dusty staircase. You enter into a cramped underground passageway to find a plastered door in front of you, embedded with depictions of a jackal and nine slaves.
After six long and relentless years of searching, this artwork is a compelling clue that you've finally found what you are looking for.
You tentatively step through the first door and then a second. As you cast your candle around, details of the rooms within slowly emerge from the mist. Strange animals, statues and gold — everywhere the glint of gold.
This is how archaeologist Howard Carter described the moment he discovered the 3300-year-old tomb of now-legendary Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun in the Valley of The Kings back in 1922.
Among the less blingy of the Pharoah’s treasures is an iron dagger. It may not look like much, but its metal is older than the Earth itself.
The dagger is made from a meteorite, a space rock that crashed to Earth long before the pyramids were built.
The iron was once part of an asteroid that floated through the infant solar system. Before that, it was forged in the heart of a dying star then blasted across the universe in a cataclysmic supernova explosion.
Of course, King Tut knew none of this cosmic backstory. But his meteoritic dagger lends an otherworldliness to an already almost mythical figure.
Today, you’ll find the dagger in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. But it more than deserves its place here too in our Museum of Cosmic Curiosities.
🏛️ Browse all exhibits in the Museum of Cosmic Curiosities here
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