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The Iron Plate:

On Friday, 26 May 1837, after a few days of blasting and clearing, J. R. Hill (working for Vyse), discovered a flat iron plate about 26 cm (10.2") long, 8.6 cm (3.4") wide, with a thickness ranging from .4 cm (.2") to nearly zero, from a joint in the masonry at the point where the southern airshaft from the King's chamber exits the pyramid. Engineers agree that this plate was left in the joint during the building of the pyramid and could not have been inserted afterwards. Colonel Vyse sent the plate to the British Museum.

Hill affirmed that his find was legitimate:

This is to certify, that the piece of iron found by me near the mouth of the air-passage, in the southern side of the Great Pyramid at Gizeh, on Friday, May 26th, was taken out by me from an inner joint, after having removed by blasting the two outer tiers of the stones of the present surface of the Pyramid; and that no joint or opening of any sort was connected with the above-mentioned joint, by which the iron could have been placed in it after the original building of the Pyramid. I also shewed the exact point to Mr. Perring, on Saturday, June 24th. (Vyse, Pyramids of Gizeh, I, p. 276)

The plate was examined by the famous Sir Flinders Petrie in 1881. He felt it was genuine and stated that "no reasonable doubt can therefore exist about its being a really genuine piece".

Extract from Petrie - That sheet iron was employed we know, from the fragment found by Howard Vyse in the masonry of the south air channel; and though some doubt has been thrown on the piece, merely from its rarity, yet the vouchers for it are very precise; and it has a cast of a nummulite on the rust of it, proving it to have been buried for ages beside a block of nummulitic limestone, and therefore to be certainly ancient. No reasonable doubt can therefore exist about its being really a genuine piece used by the Pyramid masons; and probably such pieces were required to prevent crowbars biting into the stones, and to ease the action of the rollers.

H.R. Hall wrote of the plate in "Note on the Early Use of Iron in Egypt" (Man 3, 1903):

'Now that Professor Petrie has discovered iron in deposits of VIth Dynasty date at Abydos, the contentions of those Egyptologists who have always maintained that iron was known to the Egyptians from the earliest times must be acknowledged to be correct. The fact that iron was known to, and used by, the Egyptians over 2,000 years before it came into use in Europe is very remarkable, and it is hard to square with current theories, but it is a fact. Professor Petrie's find is a lump of worked (?) iron, perhaps a wedge, which is rusted on to a bent piece of copper...

This is the third find of iron which can be attributed to the Old Kingdom. In 1837 a fragment of wrought-iron was discovered in an inner joint of the stone blocks in one of the 'star'-passages which pass upwards from the interior of the Great Pyramid to the outer air [Vyse, Pyramids of Gizeh, I., 276; Beck, Geschichte des Eisens, I., 85]. This is now in the British Museum, Egyptian Department, No. 2433 (3rd Egyptian Room, Case K, 29). In 1882 Professor Maspero found iron in the pyramid of a Vth Dynasty king at Abûsîr. Professor Petrie has now found iron in a VIth Dynasty deposit at Abydos... The presumption now is that the iron fragments from Abûsîr and from the Great Pyramid are of a Vth and IVth Dynasty date respectively. The Gîza fragment will be about 150 years older than the piece from Abydos. (pp. 147-49)

Tests were actually made in the British Museum Laboratory, and since it seems desirable that the matter should be cleared up, Dr. J.H. Plenderleith reported the following: The Pyramid piece was found to consist 'of a thin film of metallic iron with a more or less thick coating of its oxides.' Samples were examined and 'no nickel could be detected.' This was in November 1926; in April 1932 it was examined again, and the results 'completely bear out the findings of the previous analytical report as regards to the absence of nickel;' separate tests were applied to the exterior scale and to the surface of the metallic iron itself, and nowhere could nickel be detected. As Dr. Plenderleith was advised that 'all known meteoric iron contains some nickel, about 4-30 per cent,' he considered it 'unnecessary to go any further in the matter of chemical investigation.' The account of the result quoted from Man (cf. also Dr. Rickard's Man and Metals 1932, II, 834) seems therefore to have mislead Mr Wainwright. The pyramid piece contains no detectable 'traces' of nickel.

In 1989, an analysis of the iron plate was made by El Sayed El Gayar and M.P. Jones, published in their article "Metallurgical investigation of an iron plate found in 1837 in the Great Pyramid at Gizeh, Egypt" (Journal of Historical Metallurgy Society, Vol. 23 No. 2, 1989, pp. 75-83). El Gayar and Jones, using a hacksaw, carefully cut off a small corner of the plate for analysis. This fragment was triangular in shape with an area of 1 cm and a weight of 1.7g. After again determining that the iron contained "only a trace of nickel", thus confirming a terrestrial origin (p. 81), the authors found that the plate consists of numerous laminates of wrought iron and that these laminates have been inexpertly welded together by hammering. The various layers differ from each other in their grain sizes, carbon contents, the nature of their non-metallic inclusions, and in their thicknesses... None of the iron layers contains siliceous, slaggy inclusions. Furthermore, none of the other phases within the iron laminates shows any metallic copper globules, nor do they show more than small traces of the element copper. These features suggest that the Gizeh iron plate had not been produced as a by-product of copper smelting operations. The outer layers of the iron have been badly corroded and now exist as complex banded iron oxides. Small, but significant, proportions of gold were found in one of the oxidised layers and it is thought possible that the plate may, originally, have been gold-plated.

Drs. Jones and Gayer concluded the following: "It is concluded, on the basis of the present investigation, that the iron plate is very ancient. Furthermore, the metallurgical evidence supports the archaeological evidence which suggests that the plate was incorporated within the pyramid at the time that structure was being built".

A more recent analysis of the plate, however, has cast doubt on the findings and conclusions of the study by El Gayar and Jones. In their article "Gizeh Iron Revisited" (Journal of the Historical Metallurgy Society, Vol. 27 No. 2, 1993, pp. 57-59), Paul Craddock and Janet Lang of the British Museum reported that they were at first unable to obtain the section cut by El Gayar and Jones, consequently the initial study was confined to the larger portion of the plate. A new section was cut adjacent to the original section, and it was examined under a scanning electron microscope both at the British Museum and independently at the Ancient Monuments Laboratory, English Heritage (the work was carried out there by Dr. G. McDonnell). It was also analyzed by x-ray fluorescence. Surprisingly, no gold was detected in the metal or in the corrosion. Craddock and Lang further wrote:

Since the last report the original section has been returned to the Museum and we have been able to carry out a thorough investigation. Once again we must report that despite extensive searches no trace of gold could be detected, and it is our firm opinion that the original report of gold is incorrect.

The authors agreed with El Gayar and Jones regarding the structure of the iron plate, but they did not agree on the interpretation. They conclude the following - 'The structure of the plate is consistent with iron-making in the post-medieval Islamic era'.

Comment - The plate has been determined of terrestrial origin. It was declared of ancient origin because of the numulite imprints in it. This was a specific observation, as was the determination that it could not have fallen in at a later date. Other contemporary findings of iron support the idea that this could at least be genuine.

The royal funerary Pyramid Text §907 reads: The doors of bA-kA [an unknown region of the sky] which is in the firmament are opened for me, the doors of iron which are in the starry sky are thrown open for me, and I go through them ...

And finally, this extract from Miracle in Stone. (It does seem strange that none of the learned professors above ever noticed it): 'The Siniatic Mountains and hills are known to be full of iron of the most excellent kind. A Mr. Hartland some years ago, established himself in that region for mining purposes, and there, near Surabit-el-Khadem ,and not far from Wady Meghara, he found, not traces merely, but colossal remains, of iron works and furnaces, belonging to the earliest kings of ancient Egypt, and on a scale so vast as to be testified to by almost mountainous heaps of genuine iron slag and veritable iron furnace refuse (see proceedings Soc. Antiq., Vol V, 2d series, June 1873). Nay. What is more remarkable, here also, is a tablet containing the cartouches of Shufu (Cheops) and Nem-Shufu, the same as the quarry-marks discovered by Colonel Howard Vyse on the hidden stones in the Great Pyramid! These records are engraved in a soffit in the face of the natural rock, where they directly overlook the scene of the furnaces. They begin with the name of Soris, the immediate predecessor to Cheops, under whom the Egyptians seem to have been put through an apprenticeship of working in iron. One of Egypt's ancient kings also appears on the monuments with a name which means "A lover of Iron".' Apart from the obvious implications of an Iron works with the cartouches of fourth dynasty kings on it, it is interesting that the name 'Soris' is mentioned, as this seems to confirm Manetho's chronology. It also implies that Iron was understood and forged before the pyramid was built. Just how big is this mine and where is the Iron?

As final supporting evidence for the use of metal at this time we are told by Mendelssohn that 'grooves for metal bars ' were found in the casing stones of the Meidum pyramid.