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The Black Stone of the Kaaba carries three facts marked debated in this atlas, and they do not raise three separate questions. Two of them are the same scientific dispute recorded twice under different property keys; the third is a different kind of claim altogether, one a standard reference work treats as outside the reach of the dispute entirely.

One Dispute, Recorded Twice

Robert Dietz and John McHone published Kaaba Stone: Not a Meteorite, Probably an Agate in the journal Meteoritics in 1974, arguing from published photographs and descriptions, since Saudi religious authorities do not permit physical sampling of the stone itself, that its visible fragments are more consistent with agate than with a meteorite. Their method was comparative petrological analysis working from description rather than direct laboratory testing, and because no sample has ever been permitted for such testing, no scientific consensus has settled the question either way. This atlas records that same unsettled finding, meteorite, agate or basalt all proposed and none confirmed, under two separate property keys, physical composition and material, in identical wording. It is one dispute, not two.

A Different Kind of Question Entirely

The third fact is not a rival scientific claim at all. The Encyclopaedia of Islam records the traditional account that the Black Stone was given to Abraham by the angel Gabriel, linking the stone to Abraham, Ishmael and the founding of the Kaaba itself. The encyclopaedia's own method is textual and historiographical: it situates the tradition inside Islamic sacred history rather than treating it as a claim open to outside archaeological or documentary dating, because a sacred origin of this kind sits outside the sort of record that could independently confirm or refute it. Nobody is arguing the other side of it the way Dietz and McHone argued against a meteorite; it is a claim held by tradition rather than tested by evidence, and counting it as a second dispute alongside the composition question overstates what is actually unsettled here.

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• Black Stone of the KaabaStonesThe Black Stone of the Kaaba, whose three debated facts reduce to one scientific dispute and one traditional account outside evidence's reach