Ancient Egyptian celestial jewelry

A new study has found that several beads discovered in an ancient Egyptian tomb dating back 5,000 years were crafted from iron meteorites that fell from space, made about 2,000 years before Egypt's Iron Age, and are the oldest known iron artifacts on Earth.

The nine tubular beads, unearthed in 1911 from a tomb near the village of el-Gerzeh (about 5,100 kilometers south of Cairo), were described by Thilo Rehren, the lead author of the study and a professor at University College London’s Qatar campus, which is the Middle Eastern outpost of the university’s Institute of Archaeology. The researchers said the tomb dates back to approximately 3200 B.C.