An arrowhead made of meteoritic iron from the late Bronze Age

The oldest evidence for this comes from a variety of very old texts carved into the tombs of the pyramids (called the Pyramid texts). The Egyptians conceived of the sky as being made of iron, above which was water. The oldest text, for instance, says that Unas (the Pharaoh), "will acquire the sky and splits its iron." But there are lots of other examples in the texts where the Egyptians make clear that the sky was made of iron.

For what it's worth we know that the Egyptians had meteoric iron and considered it to be valuable. King Tutankhamun, for instance, was buried with a dagger made of meteoric iron.

One of the more intriguing features around Egypt is the Gebel Kamil crater, which is an impact crater from a meteor 1.3 meters large that landed around 3000 BC, a few hundred miles to the west of the Nile in southern Egypt. It would easily have been visible to the ancient Egyptians in the sky when it fell. Amazingly, the site is so remote and meteorologically stable that it is the best preserved impact crater of its size on the planet, and it wasn't discovered until 2008 when someone stumbled across it on Google Earth.

[Shameless plug: if anyone is interesting in learning more, I recently wrapped up a three-episode series about Egyptian astronomy on my podcast about the history of astronomy: https://songofurania.com/episode/030]

I know that the probability is higher that a meteorite would hit something of great cultural significance, and that perhaps the broken nose led to some of that significance. But it still seems really, really unlikely.

Isn't it a lot more likely that something routine cause the damage, and that a story was made up afterward?

https://www.napoleon-series.org/faq/c_sphinx.html

Also amusingly enough, there is an asteroid named Sphinx (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/896_Sphinx)

While Tutankhamun's dagger is very much consistent with my understanding of history, this discovery pretty much upends it.

Tutankhamun was the king of one of the most powerful kingdoms of the peak of the late bronze age. Him having a dagger made out of meteoric iron does not surprise me in the least, as long as I'm aware that meteoric iron was a thing.

But what we have here is very surprising (for me at least) on two counts. First, it's an arrowhead discovered about 1600 km from its likely source, the place where a meteor fell a good 600 to 700 years prior.

  Based on Ni–Ge concentrations and shielding derived from 26Al activity of the arrowhead, the Kaalijarv (Estonia) meteorite with a Bronze Age impact age (∼1500 BCE) appears to be a possible source candidate, implying a transport over ∼1600 km.

The other thing that I found surprising was the reuse/recycling. When we think of weapons in antiquity we generally don't think of how hard it was to make metal weapons. Until now I didn't ever stop for a second to think what happened to arrows used in battles or hunts. I always assumed the archers would fire their arrows, then go get some other arrows. But with this discovery, I'm now thinking that people were actually going over the scene of a battle and retrieving all the arrows they could (most likely along with whatever other metal things they could find, like swords, shields, axes, helmets, spearheads). One could say that people valued meteoric iron more than the more common bronze, and this is possible. But unlikely. I think people were simply reusing everything that could be reused. And so an arrowhead could still be in use for hundreds of years. At least this particular arrowhead.