Jewelry
Tue 29 May 2007
See kbuenovintage.com:
Antonio Pineda 970 Earrings
1/2 x 1-1/4″ 970 silver sheet formed earrings signed with Antonio’s crown mark as well as the Cooperativa Castillo mark and eagle assay #58. Screw backs. Were $225.
Thu 20 Jul 2006
A gem in one on Tutankhamun’s necklaces is “older than the earliest Egyptian civilisation”, and appears meteoric in origin, according to a recent report:
In 1996 in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Italian mineralogist Vincenzo de Michele spotted an unusual yellow-green gem in the middle of one of Tutankhamun’s necklaces.
The jewel was tested and found to be glass, but intriguingly it is older than the earliest Egyptian civilisation.
Working with Egyptian geologist Aly Barakat, they traced its origins to unexplained chunks of glass found scattered in the sand in a remote region of the Sahara Desert.
But the glass is itself a scientific enigma. How did it get to be there and who or what made it?
An Austrian astrochemist Christian Koeberl had established that the glass had been formed at a temperature so hot that there could be only one known cause: a meteorite impacting with Earth. And yet there were no signs of an impact crater, even in satellite images.
Mark Boslough, who specialises in modelling large impacts on supercomputers, created a simulation of a [meteoric airburst] …. The simulation revealed that an impactor could … generate a blistering atmospheric fireball, creating surface temperatures of 1,800C, and leaving behind a field of glass.
[BBC: Link]
Via Slashdot
Wikipedia: Tutankhamun