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Mörigen Arrowhead
The Mörigen Arrowhead is a Bronze Age arrowhead made from an iron meteorite. Discovered in 1873 in Lake Biel during excavations of a settlement dating to 900–800 B.C., the arrowhead is in the collection of the Bern Historical Museum in Switzerland, where a 2023 analysis confirmed its extraterrestrial origins. It is amongst 56 known ancient artifacts made of meteorites, of which the bulk (19 items) were found in the Tomb of Tutankhamun in Egypt. Description The meteorite is catalogued in Bern Historical Museum under accession number A/7396, and it was likely discovered in 1873 during a series of excavations of Bronze Age settlements by Eduard Jenner and Edmund von Fellenberg. Weighing and measuring , the arrowhead was stored with other bronze arrowheads in the museum's collection. In 1987, its composition was determined to be iron, but no further analysis was conducted. In February 2021, its meteoritic origins were investigated through a survey and search of the Bern Histor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Iron Meteorite
Iron meteorites, also called siderites or ferrous meteorites, are a type of meteorite that consist overwhelmingly of an iron–nickel alloy known as meteoric iron that usually consists of two mineral phases: kamacite and taenite. Most iron meteorites originate from cores of planetesimals, with the exception of the IIE iron meteorite group. The iron found in iron meteorites was one of the earliest sources of usable iron available to humans, due to the malleability and ductility of the meteoric iron, before the development of smelting that signaled the beginning of the Iron Age. Occurrence Although they are fairly rare compared to the stony meteorites, comprising only about 5.7% of witnessed falls, iron meteorites have historically been heavily over-represented in meteorite collections. This is due to several factors: * They are easily recognized as unusual, as opposed to stony meteorites. Modern-day searches for meteorites in deserts and Antarctica yield a much more repre ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cobalt
Cobalt is a chemical element; it has Symbol (chemistry), symbol Co and atomic number 27. As with nickel, cobalt is found in the Earth's crust only in a chemically combined form, save for small deposits found in alloys of natural meteoric iron. The free element, produced by reductive smelting, is a hard, lustrous, somewhat brittle, gray metal. Cobalt-based blue pigments (cobalt blue) have been used since antiquity for jewelry and paints, and to impart a distinctive blue tint to glass. The color was long thought to be due to the metal bismuth. Miners had long used the name ''kobold ore'' (German language, German for ''goblin ore'') for some of the blue pigment-producing minerals. They were so named because they were poor in known metals and gave off poisonous arsenic-containing fumes when smelted. In 1735, such ores were found to be reducible to a new metal (the first discovered since ancient times), which was ultimately named for the ''kobold''. Today, some cobalt is produced sp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
2023 Archaeological Discoveries
3 (three) is a number, numeral and digit. It is the natural number following 2 and preceding 4, and is the smallest odd prime number and the only prime preceding a square number. It has religious and cultural significance in many societies. Evolution of the Arabic digit The use of three lines to denote the number 3 occurred in many writing systems, including some (like Roman and Chinese numerals) that are still in use. That was also the original representation of 3 in the Brahmic (Indian) numerical notation, its earliest forms aligned vertically. However, during the Gupta Empire the sign was modified by the addition of a curve on each line. The Nāgarī script rotated the lines clockwise, so they appeared horizontally, and ended each line with a short downward stroke on the right. In cursive script, the three strokes were eventually connected to form a glyph resembling a with an additional stroke at the bottom: ३. The Indian digits spread to the Caliphate in the 9th c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
