Tutankamoun

surrounding strange yellow glass adornment of King Tut finally cracked

Published time: 16 May, 2019 15:48

File photo © Reuters / Benoit Tessier

Planetary scientists have finally unraveled the 100-year-old mystery surrounding a piece of yellow glass used as a scarab centerpiece in iconic jewelry created for the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun.

The nearly-pure silica, canary yellow stone was used as part of King Tut’s Pectoral. The large breastplate is decorated in gold, silver and various jewels centered around the yellow, translucent gemstone.

Since the 29-million-year-old piece of glass was discovered inside King Tut’s tomb in the Egyptian desert in 1922, theories as to what it could be, or where it could have come from, have varied wildly.

© Grand Egyptian Museum

British archaeologist Howard Carter, who found the stone originally, thought it a common kind of quartz. A decade later, British geographer Patrick Clayton claimed it was a piece of Libyan Desert Glass (LDG), a quartz-rich deposit of a dry lake that’s one of the rarest
minerals on Earth.

Artikel according to RT