The Egyptians lacked the technology to smelt iron, so the very small amounts of iron found before the New Kingdom were produced from meteorites. Their name for iron was ba-en-pet - literally stone of Heaven.
After the Hittite invasion, Egypt became a big customer of iron smelted in what is now Turkey and Syria. Smelting of iron in Egypt didn’t get underway until the very Late and Greco-Roman periods when they began to use ore in the Eastern Desert and Sinai using technology from the Greeks.
