Pharaoh's Gem Brighter Than a Thousand Suns

Tamas Feher from Hungary writes "An Italian archaeologist accidentally found that the central gem in Tutankhamun's regal necklace is not amber, but a mere piece of yellow glass. Kinda cheap for the famous Egyptian pharaoh, best known for his splendid golden mask. Except that piece of glass is much older than civilization. Where did it come from, StarGate? Kind of. Scientists now think a meteorite much larger than the Tunguska event fell from the sky and exploded over the Sahara in prehistoric times. The tremendous heat of the 1000 A-bomb sized fireball melted large chunks of desert sand into perfect glass. The memory of such an apocalyptic event may have made sand-glass gems a desirable symbol, meant to emphasize the pharaoh's heavenly powers."

Comments

Re:Lightning?

[Valthan]

I'm sure there has been lightning strikes, but this glass was formed over an enormous area of land, and a lightning strike wouldn't make glass of this magnitude in depth and area, it would have to be something that would be much hotter and a hell of a lot bigger than lightning.

Re:Or..

[hey!]

Graverobbers did indeed conceal their tracks -- to hide caches of treasure from competitors.

Inside the tombs, they didn't waste time. They smashed open sarcophogi and ripped mummies apart looking for jewels and amulets. Anybody visiting subsequently would have found the fact of the robbery clear enough -- by the absence of any scrap of economic value.

Re:Asimov (and Hollywood) got it wrong

[stg]

Just a slight detail - the book he mentioned isn't science fiction, it's just science. Asimov did a lot of non-fiction, too.

Re:Not 800,000 years

[AKAImBatman]

From Wikipedia:

The color of "natural glass" is green to bluish green. This colour is caused by naturally occurring iron impurities in the sand. Common glass today usually has a slight green or blue tint, arising from these same impurities. Glassmakers learned to make coloured glass by adding metallic compounds and mineral oxides to produce brilliant hues of red, green, and blue - the colours of gemstones. When gem-cutters learned to cut glass, they found clear glass was an excellent refractor of light. The earliest known beads from Egypt were made during the New Kingdom, about 1500 BC and came in a variety of colours. They were made by winding molten glass around a metal bar and were highly prized as a trading commodity, especially blue ones because they were reported to have magical powers.

The Egyptians also made small jars and bottles using the core-formed method. Glass threads were wound around a bag of sand tied to a rod and the glass was continually reheated to fuse the threads together. The glass had to be kept in motion until the required shape and thickness was achieved. The final step was to allow the rod to cool then to puncture the bag and remove the rod. The Egyptians also formed the first coloured glass rods which they used to create colourful beads and decorations, they also worked with cast glass. [2]. By the 5th century BCE this technology had spread to at least Greece. In the first century BC there were many glass centres located around the Mediterranean and at the eastern end of the Mediterranean glass blowing, both free-blowing and mould-blowing, was discovered.

Considering that the Egyptians were one of the first civilizations to master glassworks, it seems somewhat unlikely that the Pharaoh's prized gem would be mere glass. Unless, that is, there were other legends or sources of value attributed to the gem. Given the unusual color of the glass (for the period), it seems quite reasonable that it being formed by "the light of a thousand suns" was the source of its value.

Re:impact crater anyone?

[Zan Zu from Eridu]

The european crater you referred to is probably the Nördlinger Ries in Germany. Gene Shoemaker was on holiday in Nördlingen with his wife, when they discovered the stones used to build the local St. George Cathedral contained suevite and came up with the impact crater hypothesis. In 1961 he and Edward Chao proved it was actually an impact crater.

Re:"accidentally found"?

[TubeSteak]

Why isn't diamond cheap yet?

Diamonds are cheap... for anything besides jewelry. And that's mostly oligopoly pricing + labor costs (it's expensive to mine diamonds & pay professionals to cut diamonds by hand).

Industrial quality (mined) diamonds are cheap as shiat & are actually outnumbered by synthetic diamonds (around since the 1950's but not mass produced till later).

Until recently, nobody had a viable way of creating gem quality 'synthetic' diamonds. There are currently three companies that can do this & their diamonds are vastly cheaper than mined diamonds.

The various diamond importers don't care so much about the synthetic industrial grade diamonds, because those types of stones were too small/imperfect to be used for gems anyways. However, they are shitting bricks over man-made gem quality stones because the 'fakes' are cheaper to produce and are literally perfect.

So, in summary: The price of gem quality diamonds will be coming down, no matter what the big mining cartels have to say about it.

One word..

[novus ordo]

DeBeers. They have the world's monopoly on diamonds and are quick to buyoff any new mines and ventures to control the supply. They are shitting bricks(diamonds?) and spending millions into detecting the ever more sophisticated synthetic diamonds. With all the effort they force on you to make the "perfect" diamond it will cost more than just buying one from them.