Ancient Buddhist Statue Carved From Meteorite

A 1000 year old statue of an ancient Buddhist that is known as the 'Iron Man' has been analyzed by a team of scientists led by Dr. Elmar Buchner from the Institute of Planetology, University of Stuttgart. 

The statue that weighs 10 kilograms was recovered by a Nazi expedition in 1938 led by renowned zoologist Ernst Schafer, which portrays the Buddhist god Vaisravana and is believed to originate from the pre-Buddhist Bon culture of the 11th Century.

According to the geochemical analyses done by the German-Austrian research team, this statue is caved from an ataxite that is a very rare class of iron meteorites.

The findings of this study are being carried in the Meteoritics and Planetary Science. It highlights facts of the Iron Man that is considered to be a stylistic hybrid between the Buddhist and pre-Buddhist Bon culture that portrays the god Vaisravana, the Buddhist King of the North, also known as Jambhala in Tibet.

It is unknown how the statue was discovered, but it is believed that the large swastika carved into the centre of the figure may have encouraged the team to take it back to Germany. Once it arrived in Munich it became part of a private collection and only became available for study following an auction in 2009.

"The statue was chiseled from an iron meteorite, from a fragment of the Chinga meteorite which crashed into the border areas between Mongolia and Siberia about 15.000 years ago. While the first debris was officially discovered in 1913 by gold prospectors, we believe that this individual meteorite fragment was collected many centuries before," said Buchner.

According to the study meteorites inspired worship from many ancient cultures ranging from the Inuit's of Greenland to the aborigines of Australia. 

"The Iron Man statue is the only known illustration of a human figure to be carved into a meteorite, which means we have nothing to compare it to when assessing value," said Buchner. "Its origins alone may value it at $20,000; however, if our estimation of its age is correct and it is nearly a thousand years old it could be invaluable."