Ruby-Jade-Sapphire-Pearl-Diamonds-Jewelry + more

Occidental or True Amethyst is a form of quartz. or colored Rock crystal consisting of silica. Oriental amethyst is alumina.  Others are violone, a silicate of aluminum and lithium. It contains iron in the quartz.

The deeper the color, the more valuable - due to presence of manganese oxide. Oriental Amethyst or Violet Sapphire is a form of corundum and similar to sapphire and ruby.

A beautiful amethyst sample is a violet gem weighing 48 carats in the Allison Gem Collection, Australia.

The best amethyst come from Siberia, Ceylon, Brazil and Persia or Iran.

but a large one found in a cave of amethyst in Brazil is a huge crystal which measures 33' by 6' x 3'- the largest ever found.

CARNELIAN (Cornelian)

This is a translucent, orangey-red chalcedony sometimes found in yellowish tones and white, frequently with two combined. On
exposure to the Sun the hues become brighter but not in artificial light. It is capable of high polish which was why it was considered as the best stone to use as a seal, according to Pliny. The transparent red type of carnelian is known as Sard and comes from Arabia, India, New Zealand, Europe, Mesopotamia, Surinam and Siberia. Many ancient Etruscan and Egyptian scarabaei have been found carved from this stone. Buddhism includes this in sacred 7 stones -Tibetans call it A-yu and as talisman has occult properties.

Coral necklace jewelry and turquoise beads

CORAL

Coral is formed by calcium carbonate in the skeletons of colonies of soft bodied mollusks in tropical waters. It ranges in color from the rare black, to pink and reddish-orange, the classical "coral" of fashion. It is also found in a blue color.

Mexican Opals fine transparent variety of opal - Black opals are extremely vivid flashes of color including red, with dark background and of highest value Milky opal or white opals are opaque with smaller and less spectacular softer markings and colors. Fire opals or Harlequin Opal is the finest quality and variety of gemstone Water Opal is clear and colorless with internal play of color. Rose Opal or potch opal has a beautiful pink color but opaque. Hydrophane Opal is opaque but appears colorless in water.

TOPAZ - Topaz is an aluminum silicate containing about 20% water and fluorine and comes in several colors. Yellow quartz is sold today under the name of topaz and it is one of the most popular colors, although there are others which are greenish and of reddish tint.. Golden Topaz from Brazil is a golden brown to pink color.

The main topaz suppliers are Brazil, Germany and Russia. Japan also produces topaz. Topaz is harder than Rock crystal and is known for its huge crystals - a colorless one from Brazil was found weighing as much as 600 pounds, well formed and clear throughout. The largest known topaz was cut in 1977 and weighed 21,327 carats. Another is known at 36,853 carats. Found in Australia topaz is usually light yellow, green and blue also. Hardness 8 and Orthorhombic crystals brilliant and beautiful stone found in quartz rose rocks. Associated with tin ores . Tinted by heating. Sky blue topaz found in the Scottish Highlands, Brazil and Siberia.

Turquoise Vase

TURQUOISE - This stone is composed of aluminum copper sulphate hydrated phosphate of aluminum and copper) and is only medium hard. Egyptians are the first people known to mine it in Sinai over 6000 years ago. The finest is said to be found in Naishapur,  Iran, where it has been mined for about 3000 years

Turquoise is found also in Sinar, Turkestan and Tibet. The colors range from pale blue to deep green/blue. Water content affects the color of the stone. It responds to human touch and warmth and in the Middle East is used as a reflector of babies' health in the crib etc.

Beautiful Turquoise Bracelet

The whole specimen stands 4.8 cm high. Leonard also had several specimens from the Zomba-Malosa Complex, Chilwa Alkaline Province, Malawi (see the article in the January-February issue). The best known mineral from this locality is aegerine, which Leonard had in crystals up to 16 cm long, plus several zircon crystals, sometimes attached to the aegerines.

Pakistan continues to produce interesting new minerals, or just better ones than from other localities. Dudley Blauwet of Mountain Minerals International keeps on top of these things. He had some rather nice zircon from Buibin, near Astar, Waziret district, Northern Areas. They are clean, reddish brown dipyramids in what appeared to be a very impure marble, in crystals up to 1.5 cm. Some of these have been available recently, but as loose crystals with no matrix.

Dassu, Baltistan, Northern Areas was represented by stellerite in white hemispheres to 2.5 cm in diameter. Most are loose groups, some with minor muscovite matrix. They are not as lustrous as the stellerites from Jalgaon, India, but quite interesting considering the pegmatite origin. Dudley also had some of the steilerites from Jalgaon, which have a beautiful luster and translucency, some with chalcedony and gyrolite on gray-blue drusy quartz.

A fairly new dealer in the business is DeTrin-Rising Sun (145-62 7th Ave., Whitestone, NY 11357) who specializes in the minerals of Russia and its former republics. I think that some of us are reaching a degree of saturation with minerals from those areas, because there has been so much available recently. Unfortunately, much of the material available these days is mediocre and/or damaged. Not so with the material of DeTrin, the owner of which seem to have a great eye for the best quality material. Most of their stock was the typical suite from Dalnegorsk, but of very fine quality. I look forward to what this dealer will bring forth in the future. Jeffrey B. Fast (19 Oak Knoll Rd., E. Hampton, CT 06424) made available a fine selection of the new material from the Becker quarry, West Willington, Connecticut. The suite includes pale smoky, tessin-habit quartz to 7 cm long, pocket almandine crystals to 2.5 cm and white magnesite rhombs to 1 cm with minor drusy pyrite. One of the minerals I wanted to see was not in the room--the terminated pocket kyanite.

Smoky Quartz and Sterling Silver Pendant, photo by crystalmoon1

Some other local mineral material was being handled by Lawrence D. Venezia (115 Coleridge St., E. Boston, MA 02128). Rare, but not particularly attractive, were masses of orange donpeacorite from Balmat, New York. From Pearl Lake, Lisbon, New Hampshire, Larry had some very clean almandine and staurolite in schist. The staurolites are up to 5 cm in length and many have small garnets sprinkled on them.

Topaz-Mineral Exploration's specialty (1605 Hillcrest, Grand Haven, MI 49417) is the minerals of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Tom Bee, the owner, besides having an eye-opening display of minerals from that area, had many for sale. He had one of the finest assemblages of well-crystallized copper that I have seen in a while, plus fine calcite with copper inclusions, half-breeds, datolite and epidote on calcite. Many of these specimens have come out of old collections. There was a buying frenzy in his room; I almost had to fight someone to photograph a piece before it was bought. Luckily the fellow and I are still friends.

That fellow is Gary Richards, Keeper of the Earth (2511 N. Mason, Appleton, WI 54914). Gary is a very experienced dealer who spent a number of years helping Lance Hampel. On his own now, Gary is doing a fine job and also has a special fondness for minerals of the U.P. (Upper Peninsula), as they call it in those parts. Gary had recently bought an old collection that was heavy in pegmatite minerals, especially tourmaline and beryl. Localities included some of the common and expected--Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, California, Brazil--plus some that are not so common. These included Rabenstein, Bavaria; Namibia; Adun Chulon and Mursinka (both in Russia) and the old Gillette quarry, Haddam Neck, Connecticut. I was pleased to relieve Gary of the beryl from that last locality as well as the one from Mursinka.

Hans van Binsbergen of Classic Minerals (P.O. Box 1391, Exton, PA 19341) had been holding on to a batch of very high quality Lynch Station, Virginia turquoise that had been collected about five years ago. He offered for sale eight flats of bright blue, microcrystalline druses on quartz.

The new red grossular seen at the Tucson Show was well represented in the room of Beau Gordon (Jendon Minerals, P.O. Box 6214, Rome, GA 30162). They are from Sierra de La Cruz, Coahuila, Mexico and ranged from thumbnail to small cabinet size, all on matrix. Beau also had a nice selection of crudely crystallized gold from Mt. Kare, Papua, New Guinea. Most are slightly waterworn, small nuggets

Gem minerals in early Arabic literature Mineralogical Record,

Gem formation, composition, properties, sources, occurrences, enhancement techniques, color grading and commercial values-all were topics of interest to the early Arabs. By "early" is meant the 9th to the 14th centuries A.D., when this literature flourished by way of treatises and cosmographies.

The men who penned these mineral documents were of different backgrounds, ranging from scientists to international globe-trotters. A few were supported financially by aristocratic patrons.(1) The thing they all had in common was a curiosity about gem minerals.

Arabic writings on gems number in the many hundreds of pages. This article gives a brief literary survey of those writings. The scope of this survey is limited to what the Arabs had to say about several of the more important gems: ruby, sapphire, emerald, red spinel, peridot, lapis lazuli and pearl. Physical properties, enhancement techniques and imitations are discussed, insofar as they concern some of these same gem materials.

Whenever possible, Arabic-language documents were consulted in preparing this paper. Unless otherwise stated, Arabic translations are those of the author and are being published here for the first time. Where comments of my own are inserted they are set off in square brackets.

The heat treatment of corundum means ruby, is also described in Tifaschi's treatise. He notes that heating is used to improve the color of ruby. In a fascinating excerpt, he relates how this enhancement technique was employed in Sri Lanka [= Sarandib, = Ceylon]:

In Sarandib and its environs, ruby is treated by fire. People take pebbles from the earth and crush and compress them into a mass with the aid of water. [This mixture] is daubed completely around a dry stone. Then, the whole thing is placed on a rock with other rocks set down around it. Dry firewood is thrown on top, lit and blown upon [with bellows]. The blowing is applied, along with more wood, till any black overtones on the ruby have disappeared.

The amount of fire and the application of wood depends on the extent of the blackness present. People know this by experience. They heat treat stones for at least one hour and, at most, twenty days and nights. Then, they carefully extract the ruby, its blackness having disappeared.

The ruby is not heat treated a second time. After one treatment, its color can neither improve nor diminish...

This passage may surprise those who think that heat treatment is a Thai innovation of the past few decades. Interestingly, the method Tifaschi describes is reminiscent of so-called primitive heat treatment procedures used today in Thailand. It is, moreover, safe to assume that similar

Ruby necklace - Bracelet - Ring - Earrings

techniques were employed for centuries on the Island of Gems; Sir James Tennent, the author of the Victorian classic, Ceyn, records that the Singhalese remove the blue tinge of ruby "by enveloping the stone in the lime of a calcined shell and exposing it to a high heat." Teifaschi was not the first Arabic writer to discuss heat treatment. Two hundred years earlier a scientist named al-Biruni spoke of it in a probable reference to red spinel.

Specific Gravity; Ruby vs. Red Spinel

Abu Rayhan Muhammad Ibn Ahmad A1-Biruni (973-1050) was one of the most brilliant men of his age. During the 11th century he authored over 120 works on an incredible number of subjects, including a text of several hundred pages devoted exclusively to gem minerals. His superbly objective mind sets him apart from contemporaries in that he always questioned, always tried to corroborate things by way of experimentation and empirical confirmation. In effect he was one of the earliest practitioners of the Scientific Method.

Al-Biruni's most valuable contributions to what are now called the sciences of gemology and mineralogy are his specific gravity experiments. The specific gravity values he derived are known to modern-day scholars of medieval Arabic literature, but have not attained much press elsewhere. For example, he gives the specific gravity of red spinel as 3.58, blue sapphire as 3.97 and ruby as 3.85. These measurements do not deviate appreciably from the currently accepted values of 3.581 for spinel and 3.987 to 4.1 for corundum. Besides spinel and corundum, al-Biruni tabulates the specific gravities of other gem materials.

It is interesting that at least some of the Arabs appear to have distinguished red spinel from ruby, which was not the case in Europe till the nineteenth century. Even with respect to nomenclature, red spinel is balkhash, while corundum is almost invariably called yaqut.

Red Spinel and Diamond Earrings from Myanmar by Fred Leighton

The Gems of Afghanistan; Fluorescence

Although early Arabs indicate Sri Lanka as the main corundum, ruby, source, the Badakhshan region of Afghanistan is frequently mentioned for its red spinel, garnet and lapis lazuli. References to Badakhshan appear in the writings of al-Muqaddasi (10th century), al-Biruni, Teifaschi and other chroniclers. One such chronicler was an encyclopedic named, coincidentally, Yaqut (corundum!).

Shihab al-Din Abu Abdallah Yaqut Ibn Abd Allah Yaqut al-Hamawi al-Rumi (1179-1229) was most famous for his geographical encyclopedia. This magnum opus alphabetically lists cities and towns in the then-known world, defining location, commercial products, resources, weather conditions and so forth.(2) It is hundreds of pages long. Badakhshan is one of many places cited for gem deposits. Here Yaqut notes that the mountains of Badakhshan are renown for lapis lazuli and balkhash, though he adds that the latter tends to be of low quality. He goes on to say that Badakhshan produces a curious stone that glows in the dark, perhaps alluding to the strong fluorescence of some rubies and red spinels.

Possibly the most interesting part of al-Biruni's section on emerald is the reference to mines at the oases and Mount Muqattam. Which oases is he speaking of? And were the Muqattam hills an actual source for emerald, assuming he is not confusing emerald (zummurud) with some other green stone? Was Muqattam a source for emerald in times of yore? The prospect is fascinating, as historians generally regard the area of Sikkit and Zubara as the only two sources in Egypt that yielded this material (see, for example, Bauer, 1970; Bancroft, 1984; Sinkankas, 1981. The Muqattam hills are hundreds of miles to the north, in Lower Egypt!(3)

Besides sources and mining tips, al-Biruni discusses the color-grading of emeralds, imitations encountered in the marketplace, and prices. The pricing information is on a table which relates value, in silver dirhams, to carat weight. For example, a 9-carat emerald is listed at 8,000 dirhams.

The Fuller Historical Perspective

The above citations barely scratch the surface in relation to what the Arabs wrote on rocks, minerals and gemstones. As such, this article can only afford the reader a glimpse at the subject. Fleeting as this glimpse might be, however, it is important to view this material in its fuller historical perspective.

Mineralogy, gemology, petrology and metallurgy were not distinct disciplines during the Middle Ages. All were lumped together under the broader umbrella of natural science, with metallurgy seen by some as little more than a form of alchemy. Books treating of rocks, minerals and amorphous materials often included chapters on metals, advice on local gem trade practices, and bits of older poetry. One genre of Arabic literature, the cosmographies, typically contained the above information along with popular superstitions on the medicinal properties of stones, gems as amulets, exaggerated accounts about magnetic properties, etc. (Sersen, 1987).

These authors sometimes plagiarized earlier writings on precious stones, a diamond etc., but this was by no means the rule. Men like al-Biruni and Tifaschi frequently credited their sources, among them Greeks and other Arabs. Aristotle, Xenocrates, Dioscorides and Theophrastus are among the Greeks who influenced this genre of Arabic literature. The Arabs built upon this legacy, adding many contributions of their own.

One of the earliest Arab sources on precious stones cited by Arab writers is al-Kindi. A scion of the Arabian tribe of Kinda in Yemen, Abu Yusuf Yaqub Ibn Ishaq al-Sabbah al-Kindi (ca. 801-ca. 866) was a polymath of the first order, not unlike al-Biruni. His literary output was tremendous, and included A Treatise on the Kinds of Stones and A Treatise on the Kinds of Jewels, Precious Ones and Others. No copy of either of these works has survived.

Al-Kindi is quoted on numerous occasions by al-Biruni and others. His books on gems are listed in The Index, an annotated bibliography of the 10th century compiled by the bookdealer Ibn al-Nadim.(4)

Finally, no survey of this literature is complete without mentioning the Stone Book of Aristotle, sometimes translated as the Laidary of Aristotle. Appearing in Arabic in the 9th century, this text was often cited by later Arab authors. It is somewhat of an enigma, as modern scholars are not sure who wrote it. Title notwithstanding, it is generally agreed that Aristotle was not the author. The Stone Book of Aristotle bears marks of Greek and Arab influence. Fortunately, it is preserved today; a German orientalist, Julius Ruska, published the Arabic text along with a German translation in 1912.

Availability of Source Materials

Little research has been done by modern scholars into the medieval Arabic gem, diamonds and precious stones related literature. The bulk of this material is untranslated; much of it has not even been edited in Arabic from the original manuscript sources.

Since the nineteenth century, several (primarily) French and German orientalists have translated select passages and texts.(5) Unfortunately, these translations have appeared in specialized periodicals which only orientalists and Middle East historians tend to read. As a result, modern gemologists, mineralogists and others are generally unaware of this fascinating corpus of early Arab literature.

Most of the secondary-source publications consulted for this articles on precious stones, diamonds etc. and otherwise listed in the bibliography are available at major university libraries in the United States, England and West Germany. Arabic primary sources or photocopies thereof are more difficult to come by; people wishing to access such materials are best directed to the British Library facilities at the British Museum, London, or the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University.

Conclusions

This paper was written in order to fill a gap. By "gap" I mean the general lack of awareness of Arab contributions to the gem and mineral sciences. It was presented as a literary survey, with the specific intention of whetting the reader's appetite to explore the subject further.

As we have seen, Arabic writings often described gems, precious stones and diamonds in terms of sources, occurrences, mining techniques, physical properties, treatments and imitations. Though there can be little question that Greek literature influenced some of these writings, it is equally clear that the Arabs contributed much of their own: i.e., al-Biruni's specific gravity experiments, Teifaschi's narrative on Sri Lankan heat-treatment of corundum, the distinction some Arabs made between red spinel and ruby, and numerous reports by different writers on gem sources and occurrences.

This article is by no means an exhaustive study of the Arabic "precious stone books." The literature goes on to describe other gem species. For example, the Arabs devoted many pages to diamond, quartz, turquoise and malachite. Lapidary methods were mentioned, with regard to polishing techniques, equipment and abrasives. There were more references to physical properties, gem treatments, imitations, sources and occurrences. Gemstone marketing centers, particularly the one that existed in Baghdad, were also addressed. A tremendous amount of material was written just on the medicinal properties of stones and the use of gems in quasi-magical applications, notably as amulets and talismans. A bibliography follows which lists the more important English, German and French translations and studies of this literature. Arabic-language works are included. Though most of what the Arabs wrote on stones still remains untranslated, the reader can explore the subject further by way of the translations and monographs cited below.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the following people for their assistance: Professor Charles F. Beckingham, formerly of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University, for his many useful suggestions on accessing Arabic source materials; Professor Owen Wright of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University, for granting access to S.O.A.S. library facilities; the head librarians of the British Library Reading Room and the India Office Library, London, for granting access to library facilities; and

His inventory included manuscripts on gems, medicine, poetry, grammar, magic, law, religion, botany, astrology, astronomy and so forth. Several scholars have edited this book in Arabic. In 1970 a complete English translation appeared in two volumes (see bibliography: Dodge, 1970).

5 French and German orientalists--in particular the Germans--researched and published numerous articles on medieval Arabic natural sciences. One German scholar who deserves special mention is Eilhard Wiedemann. Wiedemann is well-known in Germany, but not elsewhere. An intrepid scholar, a linguist and physicist, he was fascinated by medieval Arabic literature. Wiedemann's interests were not limited to Arabic gem-related materials; he also wrote articles on medieval Arabic treatises pertaining to optics, the oceans' ebb and flow, etc.