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[[letterhead]]
SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION
FREER GALLERY OF ART
WASHINGTON, D. C. 20560

Cable address:
FREER, Washington, D. C.

Area Code: 202
Telephone: 381-5344
[[/letterhead]]

June 13, 1975

Dear Dr. Agrawal:

I am very pleased to know that you have read our publication on two early Chinese bronze weapons with meteoritic iron blades.  We do not have much more information than is contained in this publication about early use of meteoritic iron in India.  As you note, we referred to Bannerjee's pioneering work on the Iron Age in India.  I am sure that more work has been done since this was published in 1965, but you are probably in a better position to do the bibliographic research on this than we are.

Our collection here at the Freer contains one and perhaps two iron daggers which are supposed to have been made from meteorites.  Those both date from the Mughal period, and so are much later than the early uses to which you refer.  They have not been sampled or analyzed in the way that the Chinese weapons were analyzed for our publication, so the evidence is somewhat sketchy.

One publication in which you might be interested would be publication # 12 by the Center for Meteorites Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85281.  It is called [[underlined]]Meteors and Meteorites in the Ancient Near East [[/underlined]] and is by Judith Kingston Bjorkman.  She is considering primarily the area of modern-day Iraq and its surroundings, but this may be interesting in terms of your studies in India.  We would  be very interested to hear of early uses of meteoritic iron in India.  Best wishes,

Sincerely,

W. T. Chase
Head Conservator

Dr. D. P. Agrawal
Physical Research Laboratory
Navrangpura
Ahmedabad-380009
INDIA

^[[Roy - Basically this says we don't know nothing!  I met J JEDWAB of the Geochemistry Lab at the Free University of Brussels on June 9 and he sent his regards to you.  He wants a copy of our paper, which I will mail. Best, WTC]]

Transcription Notes:
* edited handwriting formatting to match instructions: ^[[text]]