There are well-known lines about Enkidu in the first tablet (I, 269, 270) of the Standard (“Ninevite”) version of Gilgamesh Epic:
"He [Enkidu] is the mightiest in the land, he has strength, His strength is as mighty as a lump of rock from the sky”.
There is a consensus among scholars that “a rock from the sky” is meteorite iron, and while the tablets with Standard Babylonian version of Gilgamesh Epic have been found in Ashurbanipal’s library in Nineveh, well into the Iron Age, their text was created in this form much earlier, perhaps in the Kassite period.
Recently the Greek Reporter published news about a study of many iron objects found in excavations across Greece and stored in many museums. Some of these artefacts proved to be jewelry from meteorite iron. To our knowledge, this is the most extensive coverage of meteorite iron artefacts to this day. While it is in Greece, far from Mesopotamia, this could serve as an example of meteorite iron jewelry in antiquity in general. The Greek artefacts are all from Late Bronze Age, that is to say, more or less synchronous with the cited Gilgamesh text.
Here is a shortened version of the news originally written by Abdul Moeed:
*** Researchers examined 91 iron objects dug up at 33 archaeological sites and now held in 19 museums. They used a portable X-ray fluorescence device, a tool that reads an object’s chemical makeup without damaging it. That mattered here, since many of the pieces are rare and fragile.
Thirteen rings stood out. Each contained notable amounts of nickel, a metal common in meteorites but rare in iron made through smelting. Of those thirteen, nine showed strong signs of a meteoritic origin. One more was a likely match. The remaining three need further study.
Nearly all the nickel-rich rings turned up in tholos and chamber tombs, burial sites reserved for the wealthy. They were buried alongside gold vessels, amber jewelry, and carved stone seals, the kind of grave goods typically linked to elite status.
Only one ring, found at the Anemospilia temple in Crete, came from a different kind of site. Every ring had a bezel setting, and most combined the meteoritic iron with gold, silver, or bronze: these rings served as status symbols among Minoan and Mycenaean leaders.
The team also traced where the raw material likely came from. Meteorites are scarce in Greece, but trade routes at the time connected the region to Egypt, where desert conditions have preserved many meteorite finds. Researchers proposed Egypt as the most probable source.
The study found little crossover between meteoritic and smelted iron during the Late Bronze Age. Smelted iron tended to show up in cruder, everyday items, while meteorite iron went into finer, more valuable pieces. That gap suggests ancient craftsmen treated the two materials very differently.
Interest in meteorite rings faded around the time Minoan and Mycenaean palaces collapsed, even as smelted iron use kept rising. ***
Let us add to this that while Egyptian provenience is likely indeed, the meteorite iron could also come from other places as well, such as Arabia or Mesopotamia.