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:"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.