This is the debate that’s been swirling over the fragments of a puzzling artifact discovered in Iraq nearly a century ago. Dubbed the “Baghdad battery,” it’s believed to have originally been a clay jar housing a copper vessel, at the center of which was an iron rod. Skeptics argue that the artifact, in its suspected arrangement, would’ve outputted too puny an amount of power to have intentionally been a battery. Or maybe it wasn’t a battery at all, counters University of Pennsylvania archaeologist William Hafford, who has extensively researched the artifact. The iron rod that supposedly acted as an electrode for the inner battery cell were really just iron nails that were part of the magical ritual.