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

weird logic in summary

[wwest4]

If the explosion happened "before civilization" then it might be hard for there to be any memory of the "apocalyptic event" that created the glass. We're talking 800,000 years here... even before the advent of oral legend (Mmmmmmm.... oral legend).

Or..

[Anonymous Coward]

The actual gem was replaced with a piece of yellow glass by grave robbers who did a very good job of concealing their tracks.

The value of gems

[YetAnotherBob]

is in thier rarety. Glass was a gemstone before it could be made in quantity. This necklace may be OLD. Glass, Diamond, Sapphire, Ruby, it's all the same. The jewlery industry is trying very hard right now to find some way to discount the value of man made stones, or we may soon see the value of all gems erode as the value of glass did once.

Re:Asimov (and Hollywood) got it wrong

[DaveV1.0]

While it is true that the kinetic energy of the components of a shattered object will be the same as the inital whole object there are several things you have neglected.

1. Because the resulting pieces will be of varying size and shape, some will be below the size to successfully reach the surface before burning up.
   
2. Not all the resulting component pieces will have the same tragectory, thus
   1. some pieces will miss the target
   2. the kinetic energy will be spread out over a larger area.
3. Because the resulting pieces will be smaller and spread over a larger area, the resulting damage will be less pronounced. Think of the damage caused by getting a large tattoo. If those thousands of small pin pricks were converted into a single strike the damage would be much greater. Which would create more damage to you: three handfulls of pebbles dropped on your head, or a single rock of equivelent mass of those same three handfulls?
   

Not to mention that in your own post you show that Asmiov states "or, by that time, something more appropriate". This indicates to me that the best tool available at the time was a nuke and Asimov understood that it may not be the best tool but was the only one available and that in the future there may be better tools.

Re:Not 800,000 years

[Vellmont]

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.

Well, that's assuming that someone saw the meteor strike, wasn't killed by it, and the legend was passed down through the generations. That's quite a lot to swallow with their being no evidence for any of it.

The distinguishing feature of the glass is that it isn't man made. Given that glass beads were common in Egypt in 1500 BC, and Tut ruled around 1300 BC, I'd say they must have known this wasn't just normal man-made glass. Perhaps they found it in the desert, but knew of glass as only a man-made substance. Finding something in the middle of nowhere in large chunks that couldn't possibly be made by a person, but which you've only seen before as being made by a person is pretty amazing. It'd be like finding big chunks of pure iron in the middle of knowhere. You've seen Iron before, but it's something that's created by people. I could easily see that such a find would make this glass special.

In fact, the earliest known uses of Iron around 4000 BCE come from meteorites. From wikipedia:

The first signs of use of iron come from the Sumerians and the Egyptians, where around 4000 BCE, a few items, such as the tips of spears, daggers and ornaments, were being fashioned from iron recovered from meteorites.

Which brings up the possibility that this glass was found before glassmaking became common, so it had a special value assigned to it. The point I'm trying to make is that no one had to see the actual meteor impact to know that this was special glass.

Re:"accidentally found"?

[PopeRatzo]

My wife wears one of those man-made gem-quality diamonds. She says she was never comfortable with really expensive jewelry, and said she'd rather us take a nice vacation or buy a car instead of me buying her a diamond, so that's what we did. The gem she wears really is perfect, and a jeweler friend of ours said it was "magnificent". I won't shed any tears for the diamond industry, bloody monsters that they are, nor for the diamond merchants who in the 20th century somehow convinced everyone that diamond rings were required to demonstrate love. Let them find honest income.