Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may have given President Barack Obama one of the most unusual gifts in history: a 2,000-year-old stone.
But this isn’t just any multi-millennial-aged rock. The stone is embedded with a 0.04 millimeter square “gold-coated silicon chip” that contains engravings of both the Israeli and American declarations of independence, New York Magazine reported Wednesday.
The Technion-Israeli Institute of Technology, commissioned by Netanyahu to create the chip, explained the gift: “The etching was done by accelerating charged atoms, called ions, and bombarding them at various points on the surface of the chip. When an ion beam hits the chip it creates a tiny recess, in this case 20 nanometers deep.”
Obama received the gift Wednesday during his first presidential visit to Israel. He presented Netanyahu with a framed wood artifact from the George Washington Room of the Touro Synagogue in Newport, R.I. -- one of the oldest standing synagogues in the U.S.
The president’s gift to Netanyahu shows that his gift-giving is increasingly creative. He gave a box set of DVDs to former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and a customized wood and charcoal-burning grill to British Prime Minister David Cameron.
Watch a video about how the stone was made below:
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