Carnelian

A red bead that crossed the Bronze Age world

Around 2500 BC, craftsmen of the Indus civilisation, in what is now Pakistan and north-west India, worked out how to draw on carnelian. They painted the stone with a paste and fired it, and the paste left a permanent white pattern: lines, circles, eyes and figures of eight. Workshops for these etched beads have been excavated at Chanhu-daro and Lothal.

The beads travelled astonishingly far. They turn up in the Royal Cemetery of Ur, in the city of Kish, at Susa in Iran, and even, much later and much more rarely, in China and Southeast Asia. Archaeologists use them as a marker of ancient trade, because carnelian worked this way came from one place first.

In 1933 the excavator Ernest Mackay met a craftsman named Sahebdino at Sehwan in Sindh who still knew the method. He mixed the juice of a desert shrub with washing soda, painted it on with a reed pen, buried the bead in live coals for about five minutes, let it cool, and rubbed it clean. As Gregory Possehl summed up the result: "It was perfect!"

• First made: about 2500 BC, Indus Valley
• Workshops: Chanhu-daro and Lothal
• Found as far as: Ur, Kish and Susa
• Etching paste: washing soda and plant juice

Sources: harappa.com, en.wikipedia.org, worldhistorylab.britishmuseum.org

A king of Ur put his name on an Indian bead

Long Indus carnelian beads were luxury goods in Mesopotamia, and at least two of them ended up as royal gifts to the gods. Shulgi, king of Ur from about 2094 to 2047 BC, had cuneiform inscriptions cut into them.

One, a 7 cm Harappan-style bead now in the British Museum, is dedicated to the goddess Ninlil "for his (own) life". The other was found at Susa in Iran by Jacques de Morgan and is in the Louvre (Sb 6627); it is dedicated to Ningal, called Shulgi's mother, and calls him "god of his land, king of Ur, king of the four world quarters".

No inscribed carnelian beads are known from the Indus itself. The stone and the craft came from the east; the writing was added in Mesopotamia. A few decades earlier, around 2100 BC, Gudea of Lagash recorded getting carnelian from Meluhha, the Mesopotamian name generally identified with the Indus region.

• King: Shulgi of Ur, about 2094 to 2047 BC
• British Museum bead: about 7 cm long
• Louvre bead: Sb 6627, found at Susa
• Source of the stone: Meluhha, the Indus

Sources: britishmuseum.org, en.wikipedia.org, en.wikipedia.org

An Indus bead in an Egyptian grave

Etched carnelian is very rare in Egypt, which makes one find stand out. In tomb 197 at Abydos, from the late Middle Kingdom around 1800 BC, excavators found a necklace with an etched carnelian bead in the Indus style.

It is now in the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology in London (UC30334). Scholars think it probably reached Egypt through Mesopotamia rather than directly from India, passed from hand to hand along the trade routes.

• Where found: Tomb 197, Abydos, Egypt
• Date: about 1800 BC
• Now: Petrie Museum, London, UC30334

Sources: en.wikipedia.org, doi.org

The oldest gem treatment: cooking a stone red

Most carnelian starts out duller than the stone you buy. Its colour comes from iron, and when brownish iron hydroxide is heated it loses water and becomes red iron oxide. Leave pale chalcedony in strong sun, or bake it, and the orange deepens.

People have known this for thousands of years. Harappa.com notes that carnelian is chalcedony "turned red by heating". In about 1516 the Portuguese traveller Duarte Barbosa wrote of a white, milky or red stone in Gujarat that "is made much redder in the fire". A Field Museum leaflet of 1927 describes stones near Cambay being sorted into those to bake and those not to, then exposed to the sun or baked in a cow-dung fire, which turned straw yellows rosy and orange into red.

It is still standard. The International Gem Society says sun heat alone can darken carnelian and advises assuming any piece has been heated unless told otherwise. It is stable, permanent and accepted.

• Colour: iron oxide
• Change: hydroxide to oxide when heated
• Recorded by Barbosa: about 1516
• Today: assume heated (IGS)

Sources: gemsociety.org, harappa.com, archive.org, en.wikisource.org

Khambhat: 3,000 years at the bead wheel

The town of Khambhat, the old port of Cambay in Gujarat, is one of the largest stone-bead centres in the world. The archaeologists Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, Massimo Vidale and Kuldeep Bhan describe it as an important centre for over 3,000 years of documented history, and the craft in the region goes back to the Harappans around 2500 BC.

The raw pebbles came from agate gravels near Ratanpur, in the Rajpipla hills, washed out of the ancient Deccan lava flows. In the 1500s the industry centred on Limodra, where Barbosa saw beads, sword knobs and rings being made and sold on to the Red Sea, Cairo and Alexandria. In the early 1600s the cutting moved to Cambay. The Portuguese word for carnelian, alaqueca, came from the Arabic al-aqiq.

The craft never stopped. In the 1990s the industry employed over 2,000 people making up to 20 million beads a year, and craftsmen today still describe seven steps from rough pebble to drilled bead, with heating to deepen the red.

• Town: Khambhat (Cambay), Gujarat
• Pebbles from: near Ratanpur, Rajpipla
• 1990s: over 2,000 workers, up to 20 million beads a year
• Arabic name: aqiq

Sources: harappa.com, archive.org, en.wikisource.org, thebetterindia.com

"No precious stone in more common use"

Pliny the Elder, writing his Natural History in the 70s AD, called the Roman name for carnelian sarda, and said it was first found at Sardis, though the best came from near Babylon. India, he said, had three kinds, some backed with silver foil to make them shine, while Egyptian stones were set on gold leaf.

Then he made the claim that sums up carnelian in the ancient world. In John Bostock's 1855 translation: "Among the ancients there was no precious stone in more common use than this." It was even famous enough to be paraded in the comedies of Menander and Philemon.

The reason was the signet, and Pliny explains why: some red stones resist the engraver and pull away part of the wax when the seal is lifted, but sarda is the most useful of all for seals. Carnelian is hard, takes a crisp engraving, and was carved in reverse as an intaglio to press into wax or clay as a signature. Museums hold thousands: gods, emperors, animals and scenes like a gladiator fighting a lion, cut into a stone smaller than a fingernail.

• Roman name: sarda
• Pliny wrote: about AD 77
• Best source per Pliny: near Babylon
• Use: engraved seals and signet rings

Sources: openscriptorium.com, perseus.tufts.edu, en.wikisource.org, metmuseum.org

Seals of Minoan Crete and Etruscan Italy

Long before Rome, carnelian was a seal stone in the Aegean. Minoan engravers on Crete carved small almond-shaped and lens-shaped seals from it between about 1750 and 1400 BC, worn on the wrist or neck and pressed into clay to mark goods and doors.

In Italy the Etruscans took up the Egyptian scarab beetle and made it their own, carving carnelian scarabs with Greek heroes on the flat underside from the 500s and 400s BC. Greek jewellers set carnelian in gold rings too, including portraits of Alexander the Great after his death.

• Minoan seals: about 1750 to 1400 BC
• Shapes: lentoid (lens) and amygdaloid (almond)
• Etruscan scarabs: about 500 to 400 BC

Sources: metmuseum.org, metmuseum.org, metmuseum.org, metmuseum.org

The blood of Isis

Egyptian jewellers loved red stones because red meant blood, and blood meant life. The Metropolitan Museum notes that its Old Kingdom hand and foot amulets were often carnelian, the colour "reminiscent of blood", to bring power and energy to the amulet.

The most famous red amulet is the tyet, or Isis knot, a looped cloth that looks a little like an ankh with drooping arms. Chapter 156 of the Book of the Dead prescribes a tyet of red jasper placed at the throat of the dead to give them the protection of Isis. Because of its link with the goddess's blood, it was usually made of a red stone such as carnelian or red jasper, or of red glass.

Carnelian also burned bright in Tutankhamun's tomb, alongside lapis lazuli and turquoise, in pieces such as his necklace of a scarab at sunrise.

• Amulet: tyet, the Isis knot
• Text: Book of the Dead, chapter 156
• Materials: carnelian, red jasper or red glass
• Met tyet: about 1080 to 945 BC

Sources: metmuseum.org, metmuseum.org, metmuseum.org, en.wikipedia.org

Napoleon's lucky seal and a death in Zululand

George Frederick Kunz, Tiffany's gem expert, told this story in 1913, citing the gem scholar C. W. King. During the French campaign in Egypt (1798 to 1801), the young Bonaparte is said to have picked up an octagonal carnelian seal engraved in Arabic: "The slave Abraham relying upon the Merciful (God)."

His nephew Napoleon III wore it on his watch chain, saying the First Consul had "picked it up with his own hands" and always carried it. He left it to his only son, the Prince Imperial, "as a talisman".

The prince carried it on a string around his neck. On 1 June 1879, serving with the British army in the Anglo-Zulu War, he was killed in an ambush. According to Kunz, the seal was taken when his body was stripped, and it has never been recovered.

• Shape: octagonal carnelian
• Inscription: Arabic, "The slave Abraham relying upon the Merciful"
• Last owner: the Prince Imperial, killed 1 June 1879
• Told by: G. F. Kunz, 1913

Sources: gutenberg.org, en.wikipedia.org

Aqiq: carnelian in the Islamic world

In Arabic carnelian is aqiq, and across the Islamic world it became the favourite stone for seal rings and prayers. Kunz recorded the tradition that the Prophet wore a silver ring set with an engraved carnelian, and that the imam Jafar declared that the desires of anyone who wore carnelian would be granted. In Persia, the names of the twelve imams were often cut into it.

Engraved carnelian seals were working documents. The Khalili Collection holds a carnelian seal of the Qajar ruler Nasir al-Din Shah of Iran, dated 1848, the year he took the throne; its inscription says that his seal became like rings of the sun and the moon.

Even Goethe wrote about it. His poem on a carnelian talisman, in the West-Eastern Divan, calls it a stone that brings good luck and drives away evil, especially when engraved with the name of God.

• Arabic name: aqiq
• Nasir al-Din Shah seal: dated 1848
• Collection: Khalili Collection of Islamic Art
• Goethe: West-Eastern Divan

Sources: gutenberg.org, wikidata.org, archive.org

A seal on the watch chain

From the 1700s into the 1800s a gentleman sealed his letters with a fob seal hanging from his watch chain, and the stone was very often carnelian, engraved with a family coat of arms. Warm wax pressed onto it came away with the crest in relief.

One survives from Captain Alexander Hood of the Royal Navy. It is a gold and carnelian fob seal engraved with the Hood arms joined to those of the Periam family, made after he married Elizabeth Periam in 1792. Six years later, on 21 April 1798, Hood was killed commanding HMS Mars when she captured the French ship Hercule.

• Owner: Captain Alexander Hood, 1758 to 1798
• Made: about 1792 to 1798
• Arms: Hood with Periam
• Material: gold and carnelian

Sources: en.wikipedia.org, commons.wikimedia.org

The 1911 warning: dyed Brazilian agate

The fake carnelian problem is not new. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica already warned that "a good deal of the carnelian now sold, however, is Brazilian agate, artificially stained." It explained the trick: soak the stone in an iron salt, then heat it, so red iron oxide forms inside its pores.

The centre of that trade was Idar-Oberstein in Germany, whose cutters turned to huge Brazilian and Uruguayan agates when local stone ran out. A Field Museum leaflet of 1927 prints the dyers' recipe table: red from iron nitrate by heating, apple green from nickel, black from sugar and sulphuric acid. Because agate layers differ in porosity, the dye soaks into some bands and not others.

That is how to spot it. Hold the stone against a bright light. Dyed agate shows its red in crisp stripes that follow the bands, often with colour pooled in cracks and drill holes, and a whole strand may be the same too-even cherry red. Natural and heated carnelian glows with a soft, cloudy colour that varies from orange to red.

• Warned of in: 1911 Britannica
• Red dye: iron nitrate, then heat
• Main source of agate: southern Brazil and Uruguay
• Test: shine a torch through it

Sources: en.wikisource.org, archive.org, gemsociety.org