Posted on 05/14/2005 2:48:24 PM PDT by blam
Museum curator credited with finding oldest 'steel'
The Yomiuri Shimbun
Two pieces of metal unearthed at colonial ruins in Turkey have been deemed the world's oldest examples of a crude type of steel, dating back to 1800 B. C.
The discovery has been credited to Hideo Akanuma, senior curator at Iwate Prefectural Museum, who tested the pieces, which were excavated in 1994 at the Kaman-Kalehoyuk ruins, 100 kilometers southeast of Ankara.
Both pieces measure between one and two centimeters long and about one centimeter wide and were excavated by archaeologists of the Middle Eastern Culture Center in Japan, who started digging at the ruins in 1986.
In his research, Akanuma magnified the metal pieces 1,000 times and found that their texture was similar to steel.
Also, he found through fluoroscopic analysis that carbon accounted for 0.1 to 0.3 percent of the objects, which is a defining feature of steel.
Until now, crude steel fragments found in the same area dated between the 14th and 12th centuries B.C. and were believed to be the oldest steel in the world.
A clay tablet found in Bogaz Koy, the capital of Hittite Empire in the same period, had an inscription that read, "High-quality iron," which is believed to refer to steel.
GGG Ping.
Stamped "Made in Atlantis".
The riddle of steel.
Crom!
Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on, off, or alter the "Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list --
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| Quantitative X-ray spectroscopy: yes. Fluoroscopy: definitely not.
The real significance of this stuff is that it would have been fairly malleable, unlike cast iron, which is all that humans were thought to have back then. If they could make this stuff in quantity (it sounds like they could, and that they knew what they were doing) there are a lot of interesting things they could have made out of it. |
Neat !!
The oldest steel was made of meteoric iron. Iron mines were developed when they ran out of iron meteorites.
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Xray flourescence: Yes.