Egyptians made jewelry from meteorites, new evidence shows. A collection of iron beads found inside a 5,000-year-old Egyptian tomb have now confirmed to have been crafted from a meteorite.

The discovery is literally out of this world. The tube-shaped beads were found in 1911 at the Gerzeh cemetery, near Cairo, and is from  between 3350 B.C. and 3600 B.C.. The beads are first known examples of Egyptian iron use-and, more significantly, they're actually from thousands of years before Egypt's Iron Age.

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."

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 beads were hammered into place, rather than drilled, as previously.

"This is very different technology from the usual stone bead drilling, and shows quite an advanced understanding of how the metal smiths worked this rather difficult material," Rehren said.

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 researchers 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.

Researchers also found that the bead was not smelted or molded into heat, but hammered into place.

University College London archaeologist Thilo Rehren said researchers were "excited to be able to see the internal structure of the beads, revealing how they were rolled and hammered into form."

Fourth-millennium B.C. metalworkers had mastered the smithing of meteoritic iron, an iron-nickel alloy much harder and more brittle than the more commonly worked copper, developing techniques that went on to define the iron age, the researchers said.

The new report reveals how ancient Egyptians obtained iron millennia before the earliest evidence of iron smelting in the region, and also gives clues to their religion's first development.

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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.