Message #78613

[Bianca]

Tut's gem hints at space impact

From:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5196362.stm
July 19, 2006








                                                         Thing of beauty:



                                    Tutankhamun's Pectoral with desert glass scarab





In 1996 in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Italian mineralogist Vincenzo de Michele spotted an
unusual yellow-green gem in the middle of one of Tutankhamun's necklaces.

The jewel was tested and found to be glass, but intriguingly it is older than the earliest Egyptian
civilisation.

Working with Egyptian geologist Aly Barakat, they traced its origins to unexplained chunks of
glass found scattered in the sand in a remote region of the Sahara Desert.

But the glass is itself a scientific enigma. How did it get to be there and who or what made it?

BBC Horizon programme reports an extraordinary new theory linking Tutankhamun's gem with a
meteor.