During his excavations of temples and tombs in the Dakhla Oasis in 1819, British Egyptologist Sir Archibald Edmonston found curious fragments of yellowish glass.

Sir Archibald assumed that the fragments came from the Roman period, but several authorities on ancient Egyptian mysticism argued that the fragments originated from a so-called Eye of Anubis, a strange instrument allegedly used by the priests of the 6th dynasty at séances and other ceremonies of necromancy.

The Bohemian mineralogist Kaspar Maria von Sternberg manages to acquire one of the Dakhala fragments on which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe performed many optical experiments in connection with its investigation of the so-called astral spectrum.  Goethe discovered that it was possible to make astral creatures and objects visible by illuminating them through a lens of the strange glass found in the Dakhala tomb.

The glass from the Dakhala Oasis has later been found to be meteorite glass, which was created in a meteorite impact about 150 000 years ago. The heat and chemical composition of the meteorite created a yellowish glass with very disturbing properties.

Archaeological surveys of the area have shown that the meteorite probably destroyed an unknown civilization of which only a few traces remains on the outskirts of the impact area