Statue may have been carved from a meteorite
GERMANY
A NEW report about an ancient Tibetan sculpture may sound like something you’ve seen in the movies.
It involves an important archaeological find, it was once in possession of Nazis, and it holds a newly discovered secret.
The sculpture, it turns out, was probably carved from a 15,000-year-old meteorite, researchers report. It sounds like Indiana Jones was involved, but not so.
All this is laid out in a report on the statue in the current edition of the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science.
The ‘‘iron man’’ statue is thought to be a depiction of the god Vaisravana, the Buddhist King of the North, aka the Hindu deity Kubera, reported German researchers led by Elmar Buchner of the University of Stuttgart.
The statue was probably carved about 1000 years ago. The researchers started testing the statue’s origins in 2007 after its auction to a collector.
‘‘In Tibet, meteoric iron used to be carved, but that tradition died out a long time ago, and only ancient artefacts are known,’’ the report said.
The 10.4 kilogram ‘‘iron man’’ has a peculiar history. A Tibetan expedition organised by Nazi SS chief Heinrich
DOONESBURY Himmler and led by zoologist Ernst Schafer discovered the statue in 1938. The expedition probably brought the statue to Germany because of the swastika carved in its centre, a good luck sign that existed in Tibetan culture long before the Nazis appropriated it as their symbol.
Chemistry tests show the statue’s iron matches fragments of the ‘‘Chinga’’ meteorite field found near the Tibetan-Mongolian border in 1913 by gold prospectors, the study said. A large chunk of that meteorite – the third largest known from the meteorite field – ‘‘was probably carved into the statue’’. ‘‘We believe that this individual meteorite fragment was collected many centuries before.
‘‘All the evidence hangs together that it is from the Chinga meteorite,’’ says Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History curator of meteorites Tim McCoy.
He called for art historians to analyse the statue more carefully to certify its putative ancient origins, tied by the study team to a Tibetan Buddhist culture roughly 1000 years old.
Iron meteorites have been carved into more ancient objects, such as knives, beads and fishhooks, McCoy says.
‘‘Iron meteorites are basically an inappropriate material for producing sculptures,’’ the study said. ‘‘The challenging use of the meteorite as well as the partial gilding of the statue implies that the artist was certainly aware of the outstanding (extraterrestrial) nature of the object carved.’’