Meteorites: stones fallen from the sky between cult and science
From the Egyptian iron of heaven to the stone of Cybele, from the Ensisheim fall of 1492 to the work of Chladni and Biot: a history of meteorites.
Before science explained their origin, stones fallen from the sky were among the most mysterious objects a person could find. Heralded by flashes, roars and trails of fire, they seemed gifts or signs from the gods. Many cultures kept them in temples, made precious objects from them or worshipped them as divine images. Their history runs through the Egypt of the pharaohs, republican Rome and Renaissance Europe, up to the scientific discoveries of the early nineteenth century.
The iron of heaven in Egypt
The iron used by the Egyptians before iron metallurgy spread came largely from meteorites. The Gerzeh beads, dating from around 3200 BC, have been identified as meteoritic iron. Analyses published in 2016 pointed to the same origin for the blade of the iron dagger found in the tomb of Tutankhamun. In later Egyptian texts iron is referred to by an expression that scholars translate as iron of heaven.
Celestial metal was therefore extremely rare and full of meaning. Tutankhamun's dagger, with its gold hilt and decorated sheath, was not a weapon for use but an object of prestige, laid beside the body of the young king as part of his equipment for eternity. The same burial included other small iron objects, a sign that the metal was considered as precious as gold.
Images fallen from heaven
In 204 BC, during the Second Punic War, the Romans brought from Pessinus in Phrygia the sacred stone of the Great Mother Cybele, in obedience to a response of the Sibylline Books. Livy describes the goddess's arrival in Rome and her solemn reception. According to ancient descriptions it was a dark, irregular stone, and many scholars suggest it was a meteorite, though no direct evidence allows this to be confirmed.
The Acts of the Apostles, too, telling of the riot of the silversmiths of Ephesus, record that the city guarded the image of Artemis that fell from Zeus. The phrase indicated a sacred object of heavenly origin, not made by human hands, and shows how widespread the idea of divine images descended from the sky was in the ancient world.
The Ensisheim stone
On 7 November 1492 a large stone fell in the fields near Ensisheim, in Alsace, in front of witnesses. Maximilian of Habsburg, then King of the Romans, took it as a favourable omen in the war against France, and the poet Sebastian Brant spread the news with illustrated broadsheets. The meteorite, reduced by fragments removed over time, is still kept in the town and is among the oldest European falls whose material survives.
Only at the end of the eighteenth century, in 1794, did the German physicist Ernst Chladni argue that these stones came from space. The fall of thousands of fragments at L'Aigle in Normandy in 1803, studied by Jean-Baptiste Biot, finally convinced the scientific community of the extraterrestrial origin of meteorites. Until then many scholars had dismissed tales of heavenly stones as peasant superstition, and popular testimony proved, in this case, closer to the truth.
For millennia meteorites joined the sacred and the material. They were pieces of sky that could be touched, and for this very reason they were guarded, worshipped or turned into objects of prestige. Today we know that most are fragments of asteroids, but their cultural history remains one of the most fascinating in the story of objects believed to be protective.