Black Stone is a rock set into the eastern corner of the Kaaba, the ancient building in the center of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.
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16 Facts About Black Stone
3.
Black Stone was originally a single piece of rock but today consists of several pieces that have been cemented together.
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4.
Black Stone is attached to the east corner of the Kaaba, known as al-Rukn al-Aswad.
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5.
Black Stone was described by European travellers to Arabia in the 19th- and early-20th centuries, who visited the Kaaba disguised as pilgrims.
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6.
Ritter von Laurin, the Austrian consul-general in Egypt, was able to inspect a fragment of the Stone removed by Muhammad Ali in 1817 and reported that it had a pitch-black exterior and a silver-grey, fine-grained interior in which tiny cubes of a bottle-green material were embedded.
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7.
The meteorite-origin theory of the Black Stone has seen it likened by some writers to the meteorite which was placed and worshipped in the Greek Temple of Artemis.
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8.
The Kaaba marked the location where the sacred world intersected with the profane, and the embedded Black Stone was a further symbol of this as an object as a link between heaven and earth.
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9.
The Black Stone had been temporarily removed to facilitate the rebuilding work.
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10.
Black Stone asked the elders of the clans to bring him a cloth and put the Black Stone in its centre.
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11.
Black Stone has suffered repeated desecrations and damage over the course of time.
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12.
Black Stone plays a central role in the ritual of istilam, when pilgrims kiss the Black Stone, touch it with their hands or raise their hands towards it while repeating the takbir, "God is Greatest".
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13.
Some even say that the Black Stone is best considered simply as a marker, useful in keeping count of the ritual circumambulations that one has performed.
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15.
Robert Dietz and John McHone proposed in 1974 that the Black Stone was actually an agate, judging from its physical attributes and a report by an Arab geologist that the stone contained clearly discernible diffusion banding characteristic of agates.
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16.
Black Stone has never been analysed with modern scientific techniques and its origins remain the subject of speculation.
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