In 1996 in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Italian mineralogist Vincenzo de Michele first spotted this odd gem and had it tested. It wasn't a precious stone at all. It was glass. But this is no ordinary glass. It is older than the earliest Egyptian civilization.
The scientific sleuthing just produced more questions: Where did it come from? Who made it?
Along with Egyptian geologist Aly Barakat, de Michele traced the mysterious stone's origins to a remote region of the Sahara Desert. Now there is an extraordinary new theory posited by the BBC Horizon program to explain the mystery stone and how it got into King Tut's necklace: It came from a meteorite.
One thing is known for sure: Austrian astrochemist Christian Koeberl told the BBC that the glass was formed at a temperature so scorching hot it could only have come from a meteorite that slammed into the Earth. If that's the case, there should be signs of a visible impact, right? Maybe not. In 1908, a massive explosion flattened some 80 million trees in Tunguska, Siberia. Scientists determined it was an extraterrestrial object of some kind even though there was no sign of it or a crater anywhere.
Now American geophysicist John Wasson, who closely studied the hit in Tunguska, thinks a similar aerial burst occurred in ancient Egypt. Some extraterrestrial object was so burning hot that when it collided with the desert sand, it turned the sand into glass.
That's not such a farfetched idea. When the first atomic bomb was tested in a detonation in 1945 in New Mexico, it created a thin layer of glass on the sand. "But the area of glass in the Egyptian desert is vastly bigger," the BBC reports. "Whatever happened in Egypt must have been much more powerful than an atomic bomb."
And the stone in King Tut's necklace is a souvenir of that explosion.
--From the Editors at Netscape
