A piece of wrought iron found in 1837 by J. R. Hill, an assistant on Howard Vyse’s expedition, embedded in cement in an inner joint near the mouth of the King’s Chamber’s southern shaft, and forwarded to the British Museum with three signed certificates. Flinders Petrie examined it in 1881 and pointed to a cast of a nummulite in the rust as evidence of long burial. El Gayar and Jones, in the Journal of the Historical Metallurgy Society 23(2), 1989, judged it very ancient and non-meteoric, smelted at 1,000 to 1,100 degrees centigrade, with gold present on one face. Craddock and Lang re-examined it for the British Museum in Historical Metallurgy 27(2), 1993, found no gold at all, and attributed its structure to post-medieval fining, placing it around the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Both analyses are published and they disagree; Christopher Dunn reproduces the 1837 certificates in full as Appendix B and rests on the 1989 reading. It remains the best-documented awkward object in the argument, whatever it turns out to be.
Connections
Great Pyramid of Giza · King’s Chamber · Flinders Petrie · Christopher Dunn · Art’s Parts · Howard Vyse · Cylinder Seal VA 243