The other day, I found some fun news on Science Daily, about beads created in Ancient Egypt. They were made from iron, and now scientists proved that they were actually hammered out and then rolled from meteorite material.
How cool is that?
Even more interesting is the fact that someone did this *before* smithing had even been invented – people were not using Earthen iron ore until millenia later. Who figured out how to do that? Who discovered that this strange stuff that fell from the sky could be hammered into shape?
I would like to say: children. They love to play with things and experiment. Of course, we’ll never know who connected the dots and acutally created flat shapes that could be rolled into beads.
Even so, I just can’t stop myself from speculating and creating pictures in my mind. And here I’m seeing a bunch of kids, having fun with those weird rocks they found. How they could be hammered flat with another rock. And maybe one of them carried their “flat rock cakes” home and showed them to a parent -who happened to be a creative person obsessed with jewelry.
Can you see this scene in your mind? The excited kid yelling “Look, mom, see what I found! Look what I made!” The curious dad, turning the flat piece of rock this way and that, and finally asking the kid: “Can you show me where you found this stuff?” And all of this in the heat and dust of Egypt in summer, with all the sounds, sights and smells of life around them.
Wow. There could be a whole story in all of this. Imagine, how these new beads save the dad I mentioned from a horrible fate – because he can present the pharao with a treasure nobody else has. Alas, I don’t have enough background to write this on the spot.
Still, isn’t cool? There are stories everywhere!
You can find the facts here: Earliest Known Iron Artifacts Come from Outer Space
And if you have a scene or plot of your own in mind, please share it in a comment. I’d love to read your version of the discovery.
