Is King Tut's Necklace from Outer Space?

Submitted by Sean Williams on Wed, 08/26/2009 - 12:08

An alien necklace in King Tut's tomb? Too right, and it's no myth or quackery. A pectoral found during Howard Carter's 1922 expedition to the boy-king's funerary masterpiece is thought to contain the remnants of a meteor impact in the desert, thousands of years before the first stones were laid in Saqqara. The amazing story began 77 years after Carter's discovery, when Italian geologist noticed something odd about a yellow-green scarab in the pectoral's centre. Subsequent tests proved the lump of glass was older than any Egyptian civilization - a lot older, in fact.

After much research, experts traced the scarab back to the Great Sand Sea, 500 miles southwest of Cairo, in which there are huge lumps of glass poking out of the dunes. The general opinion is that a meteor hit the desert thousands of years ago, heating the sand enough to create lumps of glass. To give you an idea of the magnitude of this supposed impact, the first atomic bomb test created a thin layer of glass in the New Mexico desert - chunks of glass the size of human heads can be picked up in the Great Sand Sea.

Experts had long been put off the scarab's extraterrestrial scent by Carter's own definition. In his records, the great explorer describes the jewel as being "greenish yellow chalcedony". However, Vincenzo de Michele spotted that the gem was in fact natural desert glass in 1999, shooting him to the centre of one of Egypt's great mysteries: a mystery not least because there's no evidence a meteor has ever struck the desert.

"If this glass is of meteoric origin then there should be a crater of that age" - Farouk El-Baz

"If this glass is of meteoric origin then there should be a crater of that age," says Boston University's Farouk El-Baz. "But we did not find a smoking gun for silica (glass) there." Chunks of glass were found in the Great Sand Sea by British surveyor Patrick Clayton, in 1932. "He ran into this funny area with this glistening stuff all over the place," says son Peter. Could the scarab have come from some aliens who crash landed into our planet? There's certainly no shortage of crackpot theorists who think Egyptians, Mesopotamians and Mayans traveled to the stars - could Tutankhamun have been one of Earth's earliest cosmonauts? After all, we've got RoboScarabs roaming the pyramids!

Read 7 comments, or leave your own

About The Author

Sean Williams (follow me: e-mail or

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Last three pieces by this author:

New York's Met Museum Records Best Attendance since 2001 | Bettany Hughes Publications you Can't go Without | 3,200-year-old Chariot Linchpin 'Proves Ancient Egyptian City in Israel'

Sean is an English Literature graduate, who currently works as a writer and journalist in London. He enjoys ancient history, theatre and sport. He does not enjoy Big Brother.

Comments

Rebecca T:

Those rocks of glass are incredible. The BBC article you link to compares the effect to that seen at Tunguska in Siberia in 1908. There, locals report a ball of fire racing through the sky, and a massive explosion. Whatever it was, it was enough to level a 2000km square area. Although scientists have long believed that it was caused by a meteor explosion in the sky, mysteriously no materials from that explosion have been discovered and, as in the case of King Tut's glass scarab, there are lots of questions left unanswered. Of course, it could have been caused by aliens, or perhaps even Tesla testing his 'death ray'. Hmm.

Wed, 26-08-2009 11:34

Ann:

I'm pretty sure it was not a meteor. The 'alien' stone is just space litter left behind by the Atlantic folks after they had to hurriedly leave because the giant monkeys were attacking them. They nearly had the time to bury some secrets under the sphinx, you could hardly expect them to clean up every little bit of debris lying around?!

"I’m gonna 'scend to outer space – find another race...
I’ll take your brain to another dimension
Pay close attention"

Wed, 26-08-2009 11:46

Sean Williams:

I wondered why that was playing so loudly Ann! The Tunguska incident is one of the weirdest events in the last century (well, 101 years). Many people think it was in fact the end of the world, and some believe aliens may have saved Earth from destruction at the last second, hence the explosion being a few km above ground level.

Wed, 26-08-2009 11:49

Jenny ("Egyptian Scholar"):

You know, it had occurred to me that something was odd about this scarab. I suppose feldspar was not immediately available to the craftsmen who created this masterpiece, so they settle on using this meteoric glass. I wouldn't put it past Tutankhamun to want something unusual incorporated into his jewelry, coming from a family who had ignored the rules of tradition of any medium. As much as Tutankhamun tried to disassociate himself from the ways of his father, I suspect he enjoyed a bit of artistic freedom himself. After all, the presence of the Aten and the portly belly-skinny limb rendering of his own likeness were evident in his artifacts.

Wed, 26-08-2009 23:16

Sean Williams:

I agree - there's certainly something otherworldly about the whole era, resplendent with the incredible surrealism-before-surrealism art of Tut's potential father Akhenaten and his great royal wife Nefertiti. I just love this story; it has all the mystique and wonder of a great mystery tale. You can just imagine how unbelievably regal and socialising the sight of Tutankhamun would have been to his subjects, complete with alien necklace - no wonder they readily made him all those amazing treasures for his tomb!

Thu, 27-08-2009 14:20

maggie:

We may never know the truth about that. It's an amazing piece of jewelry though, I could watch it for hours in searching for signs of time passing on it or trying to picture in my mind the man who handcrafted it. It's amazing how much it resembles with parts of native American jewelry, even after all this time this jewelry still shines in it's amazing beauty.

Wed, 31-03-2010 22:25

aranda:

I agree there should be a crater of that age but there's no way to see it since it could lie beneath millions of tons of sand. wedding cufflinks

Mon, 30-08-2010 13:39

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