- HOMEGROWN WORLD
- #HGCREATORS
- #HGEXPLORE
- #HGVOICES
- #HGSHOP
- CAREERS
- ABOUT US
- CONTACT US
In 1621, Mughal emperor Jahangir had a iron from a meteorite that fell on a village in Jalandhar forged into four weapons, and the lone surviving knife, now housed at the Smithsonian, was confirmed centuries later through x-ray fluorescence analysis to be made of genuine meteoric iron.
Then, in the midst of the tumultuous noise, something bright fell to the earth from above. The people thought fire was falling from heaven.
Jahangirnama, Memoirs of Jahangir, Emperor of India; Translated, edited, and annotated by Wheeler M. Thackston
So wrote the Mughal emperor Jahangir in April 1621, recounting what had just fallen from the sky onto a village in Jalandhar. As documented by Sudeshna Guha in ‘A History of India Through 75 Objects’, this fascinating entry from the Jahangirnama captures the arrival of a meteorite, its retrieval by a tax collector named Muhammad Sa'id, and its eventual journey to the emperor's court.
When the iron reached Delhi, Jahangir ordered his master craftsman, Ustad Daud, to forge it into two swords, a dagger, and a knife. The resulting blades, mixed with ordinary iron to make the material workable, took on what the emperor described as a watered, rippling effect, cutting as cleanly as the finest Yemeni steel.
Of the four weapons made from that cosmic iron, only the knife survives. Now housed in the Freer Gallery of Art at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art in Washington D.C., the blade measures just over 26 centimetres.
The knife's survival into modern times came about under curious circumstances. As WAMU's Sabri Ben-Achour reported, an Iranian businessman living in Washington D.C. turned up at the Smithsonian in the 1950s carrying the blade, claiming it was the original weapon. Debra Diamond, Curator of South and Southeast Asian Art at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art, described the cultural context in which Jahangir received such wonders: "There are so many instances of events or battles or fabulous gems or jewels that were brought to him, and for certainly the Mughal emperors, the wonders that happened within their vast empire, were considered credit or legitimation for their power."
The verification of the knife's meteoritic origins itself became a decades-long puzzle. Initial acid tests in the 1970s, which dripped acid onto the blade to detect nickel, a metal characteristic of iron meteorites, returned inconclusive results. It was only in the 1980s, when researchers applied x-ray fluorescence analysis, that the picture clarified. By directing x-rays at specific points on the blade, scientists confirmed that one of the metals present carried a high concentration of nickel, consistent with meteoric iron. The wavy pattern visible on the blade is the result of pattern welding, produced when two different metals are forged together and etched, exactly as Jahangir described in the Jahangirnama.
Diamond described the blade as having a particular quality visible even to the naked eye: "It does kind of glisten and shimmer in a special way." She pointed to the inscription on the hilt as its own testament to the event, reading it as a celebration of what had arrived: "a spark of imperial lightning."
What happened to the two swords and the dagger made alongside it remains unknown, lost somewhere in the centuries of Mughal expansion and decline. The broader world of Mughal bladed weapons continues to surface in auction rooms. In 2019, a jade dagger belonging to Jahangir's own son, Shah Jahan, sold for $3.4 million at Christie's as part of the 'Maharajas and Mughal Magnificence' sale, setting a record price for an Indian jade object. That collection was drawn from the Al Thani Collection of the Qatari royal family.
Fascinating how a piece of interplanetary debris that survived the solar system's formation fell through the atmosphere of Mughal India, and ended up in a showcase on the other side of the world.
If you enjoyed reading this, here’s more from Homegrown:
Sandeep Menon’s ‘Sacred Grounds’ Maps The Beautiful Game's Political & Social Influence
The Down Troddence Is Reimagining Indian Metal As A Site Of Real Political Resistance
What Can’t Be Streamed: The Tactile Legacy Of Coshish’s 'Firdous'
Perumal Murugan & Appupen's Vaadivaasal Is A Graphic Reimagining Of A Tamil Classic
