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Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

Very remarkable that there's a surviving ~3,770 year old written document mentioning a ~3,770 year old household object, and someone was able to match the two:

- "In the Amarna Letters, a diplomatic correspondence written on clay tablets and discovered in a royal archive in the south of Egypt, there is a list of gifts sent by King Tushratta of Mitanni in Anatolia, to Pharaoh Amenhotep III, Tutankhamun’s grandfather of Ancient Egypt when he married Princess Tadukhipa, the daughter of Tushratta. Among the gifts mentioned in the list is a dagger with an iron-made blade. The research of Arai’s team states that this is very likely to be the same dagger for two main reasons..."

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This is a good bit more recent, but perhaps even wilder, given that the owner was not a king, and the object was stolen:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_Silvianus

> Wheeler called upon J.R.R. Tolkien, as Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University, to investigate the etymology of the name "Nodens" referred to in the curse.

Whaat..?!

You might like this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inklings

What is your question? Separately from the public career of writer, Tolkien was a leading scholar of the Anglo-Saxon language (also called Old English).

The author of the parent post is expressing an emotion commonly referred to as “surprise”.

I do believe that the point here is that iron daggers were not commonplace 3770 years ago. Bronze daggers would have been. Not my area of expertize though.

An iron dagger back then would be like a platinum dagger today.

Or a straight-up lightsaber. The number of iron daggers on the planet 4000 years ago probably numbered less than 100

This view has started to change in the past decade. Iron is mentioned several times in Anatolia during the Old Assyrian Period c. 1850 BC. And this is several centuries before the time of King Tut. But iron of good quality was certainly rare and expensive, especially in places outside Anatolia.

Maybe, though even older usage "Some recent studies date the inception of iron metallurgy in Africa between 3000 and 2500 BCE" from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_metallurgy_in_Africa

But dry flat area's and many centuries of meterite build up, i'm sure there were many unique timelines for iron usage we may only speculate about.

Supposing that the dating of those African iron metallurgy sites is truly so early as claimed, that would be an independent discovery of the process, which does not seem to have had any influence upon the later discovery in Caucasus or Anatolia, of how to extract iron from iron ore, which spread during the 2nd millennium BC to the Mediterranean countries.

I believe iron is actually in the same ballpark as bronze. The benefit is more one of availability -- if you have the technology to handle iron, you don't need to go around and find sources for both tin and copper. And of course you might accidentally invent steel.

> Very remarkable that there's a surviving ~3,770 year old written document

> King Tushratta of Mitanni

Tangent, but Tushratta is one of my favorite historical examples for a completely different reason.

Tushratta's uncle killed his [Tushratta's] father in a coup and made himself regent for Tushratta. He then had Tushratta raised in isolation, with contact between Tushratta and other members of his family forbidden.

When Tushratta reached the age of majority, the uncle peacefully transferred power to him.

And, in a move that would utterly fail to surprise anyone from a civilization more recent than 3,800 years ago, Tushratta's first act as king was to have his uncle and his uncle's lackeys executed.

It still boggles my mind that the uncle allowed the power transfer to take place. Did he not realize what would happen?

Are we sure transition from uncle to nephew was truly peaceful. It makes no sense. In general transition are so delicate and often fraught with violence.

I only know what I read in Brotherhood of Kings, and I agree it makes no sense.

But I don't really see anything that would salvage the situation to the point where it made some kind of sense. You'd need to imagine a political situation balanced so finely that Tushratta's uncle could hold on to the throne after killing his own brother, but killing his nephew would have been a step too far. And then he had years -- during which he had successfully isolated Tushratta from the rest of his family! -- to let some kind of accident happen to him, but it didn't.

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