BURKE J.G. (1986) Cosmic Debris, Meteorites in History, pp. 221-223: Partsch evidently favored a meteoritic origin of the stone, both because of von Laurin's description of the black exterior of the fragment he viewed, its interior texture, and its purported heaviness, and because Muslims said that it came from heaven and venerated it as the Greeks and Romans venerated similar stones not too far distant in time and place. In 1974 Dietz and McHone emphasized that the Muslims do not claim that the stone is a meteorite. They postulated that the stone is an agate, because of the high polish it displays among other physical attributes and because an Arab geologist, who studied the stone carefully during a pilgrimage to Mecca, reported that "diffusion banding is clearly discernible within the stone. In 1980, however, Thomsen presented a different hypothesis. She suggested that the stone may be a chunk of impactite glass, mined from one of the meteorite craters at Wabar in the so-called Empty Quarter of central Saudi Arabia, about 1,100 km from Mecca. She pointed out that the "whiteness may derive from an exposure of the interior white core of a bomb or... from a large fragment of white glass or sandstone," and that the whiteness remains only where it is protected by cement. Further, she wrote: "The yellow and white spots may be remnants of glass and/or sandstone. The porosity which allows it to float is due to vesicles in the glass, and the resistance of the material to abrasion due to the hardness of the glass. The blackness results from the nickeliferous iron spherules captured from an explosion cloud of Ni and Fe." Thomsen also thinks that ancient Arabs may have observed the meteorite fall, estimated to have occurred about six thousand years ago, and that natives later carried the impactite glass to Mecca along a caravan route.
Thus, there is now considerable doubt that the black stone of the Ka'ba is a meteorite. Partsch Paul (1857) Über den schwarzen Stein in der Kaaba zu Mekka (Denkschriften der Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien, 13, pp. 1-5). Dietz R., McHone J. (1974) Kaaba Stone: Probably an agate (Meteoritics 9, pp. 173-179) Thomsen Elsebeth (1980) New light on the origin of the Holy Black Stone of the Ka'ba (Meteoritics 15, pp. 87-91). ------------------------------------------ Regards, Bernd ______________________________________________ Visit the Archives at http://www.meteoritecentral.com/mailing-list-archives.html Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
