This little gem is an excerpt from a Fogg monograph dated 1924. We got it from the website of the official society of Hannibal Fogg though for the life of us couldn’t download the whole thing!!! Anyone figure this out let us know please!
Further thoughts on the recent horde of King Tutankhamun’s treasure.
When Mr Howard Carter gave the author the great honour of allowing him to examine at his leisure the recent horde of treasure found in the King’s Valley it was an opportunity for much speculation and not a little discovery. The attention was drawn however, not to the most spectacular finds but rather to those that excited curiousity as to their meaning and existence. For the author’s part, owing to considerable experience in the business of precious stones, it was observed that the pectoral pediment of the young contained a handsome scarabe made, as Carter mentioned, from carven chalcedony, a common enough quartz variant favoured by new kingdom royalty. But closer inspection revealed that this was not quartz. Shining a source of blue light into the jewel revealed a lack of the patterend refractive qualities of a crystalline substance such as quartz. Examination with a jewellers’ loupe revealed no familiar structural defects of that mineral, rather it was obvious this was no crystal at all but was in fact pure glass.
Glass, though, had not been invented in 1200 BC, so this had to be a form of tektite or natural glass, the like of which is found mixed with volcanic rock in Moldavia and also in the desert of the empty quarter of Arabia Felix. The author’s friend and fellow Balliol man, Ahmed Hassanein Bey, supplied the crucial piece of information that solved this apparent conundrum. On visiting Siwa, the site of the oracle made famous by Alexander, Hassanein Bey, had been presented with ancient stone tools, of the kind found all over the Libyan desert, yet these were fashioned from what looked like broken glass. They had been brought to him by Senussi bedouin traveling deep into the sand seas of the south looking for falcons. Obviously they were not made from glass, since they were of more ancient origin than even the treasures of ancient Egypt. They had to be of tectitic origin. The Bedouin..more
