In case Egyptians didn't seem awesome enough, it's recently been discovered that they made jewelry from meteorites. Scientists have now confirmed with the help of special microscopes that an iron bead found inside a 5,000-year-old Egyptian tomb has celestial origons-- it was made from a meteorite.

The bead was made thousands of years before Egypt's Iron Age and is the first known example of Egyptian iron use. They jewelry also provides interesting clues to the possible origin of Egyptian mythology and religious belief.

Co-author Dr Joyce Tyldesley, a Senior Lecturer in Egyptology at The University of Manchester, told press, "Today, we see iron first and foremost as a practical, rather dull metal. To the ancient Egyptians, however, it was a rare and beautiful material which, as it fell from the sky, surely had some magical/religious properties.

"They therefore used this remarkable metal to create small objects of beauty and religious significance which were so important to them that they chose to include them in their graves."

The tube-shaped bead was found in 1911 at the Gerzeh cemetery, near Cairo, and is from between 3350 B.C. and 3600 B.C. When the jewelry was first discovered, researchers noted that the beads were high in nickel - one sign they came from meteorites. But later academics thought the nickel could have been the result of smelting. The beads were analyzed with an electron microscope and an X-ray CT scanner, and found that it wasn't - the beads have celestial origins.

"The sky was very important to the ancient Egyptians," says Joyce Tyldesley, an Egyptologist at the University of Manchester, UK, and a co-author of the paper. "Something that falls from the sky is going to be considered as a gift from the gods."

The researchers were not allowed to cut the bead open, but they found areas where the surface had weathered away into "little windows" to the metal underneath.

The scientists found something curious - the bead had a distinctive structure in its molecular composition found only in meteorites that cool slowly inside asteroids during the solar system's formation. The crystal structure is called a Widmanstätten pattern.

The team also found that the bead was not smelted or molded into heat, but hammered into place in cold-working, clearing up mysteries about the likelihood of melting metal down long before it was known to be possible.

Philip Withers, Professor of Materials Science at The University of Manchester, told press: "Meteorites have a unique microstructural and chemical fingerprint because they cooled incredibly slowly as they travelled through space. It was really interesting to find that fingerprint turn up in Egyptian artifacts."

While nothing can be confirmed about Egyptian religion before the advent of writing, the finding might also have significant implications to the development of Egyptian religious beliefs. Campbell Price, a curator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum, notes that later in Egyptian history, during the time of the pharaohs, the gods were said to have bones forged from iron.

He speculates that meteorites may have inspired this belief, and that the rocks were viewed as the physical remains of the gods falling.