Around 3,000 years ago, some of the most powerful people in the Greek world wore rings made from a material that had fallen from the sky. The unusual jewellery belonged largely to the Minoan and Mycenaean elite, and its metal was not produced from the ores being worked by early metalworkers. Instead, chemical clues preserved in the ancient rings point to iron that came from meteorites. A new study published in ScienceDirect, titled ‘ Iron in Greece in the second millennium B.C.E .’, has now traced that extraterrestrial connection by examining the composition of 91 Bronze Age and Early Iron Age iron objects from across Greece, using portable X-ray fluorescence without damaging the artefacts. Thirteen rings contained significant amounts of nickel, a strong indicator of meteoritic iron, with nine judged very likely to have originated from meteorites. Yet the practice did not last. The use of this rare space-born metal declined around the time the Mycenaean palace system collapsed, leaving archaeologists with an ancient fashion whose disappearance remains unexplained.
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