Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- The opportunity for fraud is immense, unless the elite sourced their own meteorites.by IAmBroom
- > The opportunity for fraud is immense
At the time, not so much. It was called "The Bronze Age" and "The Iron age" came later. The names aren't random.
From the article:
> The use of meteoritic iron particularly stands out during the Bronze Age because of the lack of iron smelting at the time.
In other words, the main source of this special metal was when the Gods occasionally threw down a piece, in a column of fire.
See also in ancient Egypt:
https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/museums/2013/09/01/23856/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S12962...
- How so? This was the Bronze Age; smelting iron ore wasn't really a thing yet, so meteoric iron was pretty much the only kind available.by mrec
- Iron smelting had not been invented yet. Meteorites were the only readily available source of iron. Upon the invention of smelting all iron rings appear to be smelted.
- I wonder how many meteorites were laying around in the early days of humans caring about metal.by Brendinooo
- apparently several thousand small meteors strike earth per year. eventually they'd get buried but there would likely be a pretty huge number of them lying around after a few million years.by jayGlow
- There are some places, like Cape York, where the meteorite was immense so fragments are in a long line and cold forging gets developed. That is, you keep bumping into bits in the same area so you start to think. Sometimes people are interested in the recurrent fragments but do not forge, as Canyon Diablo, which I think is tough to handle anyway. They know the bits are from the stars, which is quite enough to delight. In Egypt there seems anciently to have been an activity of hunting for where 'iron from the sky' landed, before there was hot forging. I don't know if there is a case of a spectacular strewn zone there, but the phenomenon had been taken on board, and continued much later. I dimly remember first reading about it when a bedoin's camel was found somehow outfitted with something beaten from a meteorite.by applicative
- > Rings forged from meteorites
When I first read the title, it sounded to me like a classic case of Kessler syndrome.
by qrios - It should read Egyptian rings forged from meteorites were fashionable within the regional trading area in ancient times. But : cultural misapropriationby metalman
- I'm 100% certain that such rings grant superpowers determined by a cosmic RNG.by karim79
- My engagement ring contains meteorite, supposedly from the Gibeon Meteorite, although the fact that a single meteorite is a component advertised in so many rings makes me somewhat suspicious as to the quantity or authenticity. But it looks pretty, anyway.
- The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibeon_(meteorite) is 26 tons, plus 100+ fragments in a strewn field of 10,000+ sq. miles.
It proves nothing - but from just 100kg, you could put 1/2 carat bits of meteorite in 1,000,000 rings.
by bell-cot - If I get lucky in IPO land I'll have my eye on a Jaeger-LeCoultre watch with a meteorite dial, so I guess things have not changed all that much in the last 3500 years :Pby tikhonj
- A couple of years ago, this 3000 year old arrow head was found in Switzerland, it comes from a meteorite up in Estonia. I read about this news right when I was visiting the island of Saaremaa and the site. It's an amazing place and as the arrow shows, material like this got traded far even quite far back.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-3000-year-old...
by yesbabyyes - They're still fashionable! ... or maybe I'm a geek.by rithdmc
- A Greek?by 542354234235
- same here.. my wedding band is a https://www.chrisploof.com/ band.by senectus1
- In ancient times with no light pollution they could probably see and track meteorites falling. And it could have been easier to access to get those metals than mining.by xbmcuser
- They go completely dark at a very high altitude. I feel like a bright sunny day would give you a better chance of seeing a falling rock, at least once it gets closer to the groundby russdill
- Perhaps sometimes they saw it hit and went to find it? But the night is long and people should be indoors asleep near the fire and meteorites fall all around the clock anyway?
So perhaps they mostly just picked weird rocks up off the ground, as the Inuit did? When you spend time outside with the herds you probably notice unusual wrongs.
by wood_spirit - Something about this feels very Tolkien-ish.
Nobody mention it to Peter Thiel, he doesn’t need any more ideas.
by stefan_lec - Actually, maybe we should. Get him distracted and focused on solving that using all of Palantir's might, and then he'll leave the rest of the world alone.by bigbuppo
- Speaking of myths, one explanation of the mysterious metal adamantine is that it was iron, forged from meteors.
To Bronze Age Greeks, lacking the ability to smelt iron, an iron weapon would have been surpassingly strong, sharp and rare.
Later, during the Iron Age, Adamantine got retconned into something else (like diamond).
by mr_toad - > sheds light on how the ancient Minoan and Mycenaean elite
Mycenaeans are considered Greek.
Minoans generally not considered Greek.
Their script, Linear A, has never been deciphered, so we don’t actually know what language they spoke, but most linguists think it wasn’t Greek, based on how poorly Linear A’s signs map onto Greek phonetics when tested as they do successfully with Mycenaean Linear B.
Culturally the Minoans also look distinct from later Greek civilization. Different religious iconography (bull-leaping, goddess-centric imagery), different art style, no clear warrior-elite hierarchy the way Mycenaean and later Greek society had.
by andsoitis - Except it does partially map into Greek, they had settlements on several Greek islands, influence on the Cyclades, and talk about similar Gods.
Even the cave where Zeus was allegedly born is on Crete.
by anon48293 - Linear B also maps poorly to Greek as far as I know. It's clearly an adaption of a foreign script.
- > Their script, Linear A, has never been decipheredby qup
- > Mycenaeans are considered Greek
It's fair to argue they aren't. The Assyrian people still exist [1] today. Their language and culture having been passed on-unbroken–by the living to the living for thousands of years.
The Myceneans–like the Hittites and others whom we know so little about we haven't even named them–are in a fundamentally distinct category. Like yes, they weren't nuked out of existence. But there is a permanent and irreparable break in the continuity of exchange that severs the timeline between then and now.
- The actual paper doesn't claim that, it understands they are two distinct cultures but itn covers the georgaphical Greece in the title not cultural.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03054...
by altmanaltman