The constant references to iron, though easy to overlook, were puzzling. Iron, I knew, had been a rare metal in Ancient Egypt, particularly in the Pyramid Age when it had supposedly only been available in meteoritic form.17 Yet here, in the Pyramid Texts, there seemed to be an embarrassment of iron riches: iron plates in the sky, iron thrones, and elsewhere an iron sceptre (Utterance 665C) and even iron bones for the King (Utterances 325, 684 and 723).18 In the Ancient Egyptian language the name for iron had been bja, a word that meant literally ‘metal of heaven’ or ‘divine metal’.19 The
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If iron is mostly available via meteorites, wouldn't it make sense that the heavens would be rich with it?
