One religious statue has a stronger connection than most to the heavens. An 11th-century carving from Mongolia of the Buddhist god Vai?ravana was fashioned from a meteorite fragment, a chemical analysis shows. Its extraterrestrial origins make it unique in both religious art and meteorite science.
The iron-rich statue, 24 centimetres tall, has had a colourful past. It was apparently brought to Germany in 1939 by a Nazi-backed archaeological expedition to search for the roots of Aryanism.
A swastika on the armoured Buddha's breastplate may have been a motivating factor in bringing the statue to Germany. The swastika is a common symbol in eastern culture and decorates many Hindu and Buddhist statues ? although the version on the statue is a mirror image of the form favoured by the Nazis.
It's unclear whether the Nazis found anything of unusual significance in the statue, but Elmar Buchner at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, and his colleagues certainly have.
"When I first saw the statue I was sure that it is made of an iron meteorite," Buchner says.
Their chemical analysis of the statue confirmed the hunch. It showed that the concentrations of metals, including iron, nickel, cobalt and chromium, matched the values known from iron meteorites.
Space Buddha
More precisely, Buchner's team has managed to tie the statue to a known meteorite ? the Chinga ataxite, which fell to Earth between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago near the border between Siberia and Mongolia. It fragmented as it fell, and just two pieces heavier than 10 kilograms were known before the new analysis. The "Space Buddha", as Buchner's team has dubbed the statue, is the third such piece, at 10.6 kilograms.
"Having looked at some of the published trace element data for this artefact, it looks pretty convincing to me that this is very likely originated from Chinga iron meteorite," says Meenakshi Wadhwa, director of the Center for Meteorite Studies at Arizona State University in Tempe.
Other venerated objects are thought to have had similar extraterrestrial origins ? including the Black Stone in Mecca, Saudi Arabia ? but Wadhwa says it is difficult to verify these assumptions because the objects have never been fully analysed scientifically. And none of these supposed meteorite fragments has been carved into a religious sculpture, making the Space Buddha the only one of its kind.
Meteoritic metal is associated with a number of ancient cultures, says Matthew Genge at Imperial College London. "There are reports of Egyptian necklaces including meteoritic metal," he says. "But there is no evidence that the Egyptians were aware of their extraterrestrial provenance."
Sky iron
In Tibet, though, meteoritic iron was long known as namchag, or "sky iron", says Buchner's team, suggesting the locals were aware of the origins of the unusual material.
"There is no definitive evidence that ancient peoples witnessed and revered meteorite falls," says Genge. "However, the chances are good. There are so many modern witnessed falls that ancient people must have seen them. They are such special events that they must have attracted awe and speculation."
The age of the Chinga meteorite means that no one alive when the Space Buddha was carved would have seen this particular rock fall from the sky. Instead it would have been recovered much later ? making it what geologists call a meteorite find.
That creates something of a problem, says Genge. How did ancient people come to venerate meteorites, or meteorite craters, without witnessing the moment of impact?
"One of the most puzzling examples is Gosses Bluff in Australia," he says. "This crater is 142 million years old, and yet the Aborigines hold that it formed by the fall of the baby of one of the celestial women from the sky. A strange coincidence perhaps."
Journal reference: Meteoritics & Planetary Science, DOI: 10.1111/j.1945-5100.2012.01409.x
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