Lapis lazuli

The nun with ultramarine in her teeth

In a churchyard at Dalheim in western Germany, archaeologists found a woman who died in middle age sometime between about AD 997 and 1162. When scientists dissolved the hardened plaque on her teeth, hundreds of tiny bright blue specks came loose.

Tests with X-ray and Raman spectroscopy showed the specks were lazurite: ground lapis lazuli, the finest blue a medieval painter could buy. The most likely explanation, the team said in Science Advances in 2019, is that she painted illuminated manuscripts and licked her brush to a fine point as she worked.

It matters because the convent's books burned in the 1300s, and medieval scribes were long assumed to be men. A few flecks of Afghan stone in one woman's teeth are now the only surviving evidence that a skilled female artist worked there.

• Found at: Dalheim, Germany
• Dated: About AD 997 to 1162
• Evidence: Lazurite specks in dental plaque
• Published: Science Advances, January 2019

Sources: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, york.ac.uk

A colony built for blue stone

Lapis was traded long before the first cities. Beads made from Badakhshan lapis turn up in early burials at Mehrgarh, a farming village in what is now Pakistan, hundreds of kilometres from the mines, and by around 4000 BCE the village had a workshop drilling lapis beads.

Around 2000 BCE the Indus civilisation went a step further. At Shortugai, where the Kokcha river meets the Amu Darya in northern Afghanistan, it planted a small trading town of its own, the farthest north any Indus settlement is known to reach. Britannica describes it as most likely placed to control the lapis trade coming down from Badakhshan.

• Shortugai founded: About 2000 BCE
• Where: Kokcha and Amu Darya rivers, Afghanistan
• Excavated by: A French team

Sources: britannica.com, en.wikipedia.org, harappa.com

Kings paid each other in lapis

In the 1300s BCE the great kings of the Near East wrote to Egypt on clay tablets, now called the Amarna letters. Burna-Buriash II of Babylon sent horses, chariots and lapis lazuli, and asked for gold in return. When the gold arrived underweight, he complained in writing.

One of his gifts was personal. To celebrate the birth of the pharaoh's first daughter, Meritaten, he sent a necklace of lapis beads shaped like crickets, along with two minas of lapis, roughly a kilogram. The tablet that came with it is now in the British Museum.

Egypt had no lapis of its own, so every piece in a pharaoh's treasure came by trade or gift. On the gold mask of Tutankhamun, the eyebrows and the long lines painted around the eyes are inlaid lapis lazuli.

• Letters: Amarna letters EA 6 to 14
• Babylon sent: Lapis, horses, chariots
• Egypt sent: Gold, ivory, ebony
• Tutankhamun's mask: Lapis eyebrows and eye lines

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

Myth: the Ishtar Gate is made of lapis

You will often read that Babylon’s Ishtar Gate is built of lapis lazuli. It is not. Nebuchadnezzar II (604 to 562 BC) had it built of baked clay bricks, each moulded in relief and coated with coloured glaze: yellow and brown dragons, bulls and lions striding across a brilliant blue glazed ground.

The reconstruction in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum combines the excavated glazed-brick fragments with modern blue bricks. Writers often say the blue was meant to recall lapis, but the museums themselves describe only a blue glaze, so treat that as a guess, not a fact. The real lapis of Mesopotamia is in the jewellery and seals, such as Queen Puabi’s headdress from Ur.

Sources: metmuseum.org, isaw.nyu.edu, smb.museum

The first fake lapis was invented in Egypt

Real lapis was so costly that Egyptian craftsmen learned to copy its colour. Blue-glazed faience, a fired quartz paste with a copper glaze, was used for amulets, beads and little figures. The Brooklyn Museum notes that the blue of lapis was valued so highly that it was imitated in this cheaper material, which kept the same sacred meaning.

Egyptians also made Egyptian blue, one of the first man-made pigments, from about the third millennium BCE, partly to stand in for lapis and turquoise. So the long story of lapis imitations, from Egyptian faience to dyed howlite on Amazon, is about five thousand years old.

• Faience: Quartz paste with copper glaze
• Egyptian blue: Man-made pigment, about 3rd millennium BCE
• Purpose: Cheaper stand-ins for lapis and turquoise

Sources: brooklynmuseum.org, en.wikipedia.org, langantiques.com

A story written on lapis

The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest stories ever written down, opens with an invitation. The reader is told to find a cedar box, undo its bronze clasps, lift the lid and take out a tablet of lapis lazuli, on which the king's whole story is written.

Nobody wrote long texts on real lapis: it was far too precious. The point was the image. To a Babylonian audience a story kept on lapis was a story worth keeping forever, the way we might say something is written in gold.

Egypt felt the same. Its word for lapis, usually written khesbed, came in later periods to be used for joy and delight as well.

Sources: library.biblicalarchaeology.org, gradesaver.com, isiopolis.com

Where ultramarine paint began

For thousands of years lapis was carved and inlaid, not painted. Among the earliest known paintings made with ground lapis are the Buddhist cave murals at Bamiyan in Afghanistan, from around the sixth and seventh centuries AD, not far from the Badakhshan mines.

A Japanese conservation study found the Bamiyan painters had used natural lapis abundantly and had deliberately refined and washed it into a true ultramarine pigment. The same caves later made news for another first: some of the world's oldest known oil paint, from the mid 600s.

• Where: Bamiyan caves, Afghanistan
• When: About 6th to 7th century AD
• Also found there: Very early oil paint

Sources: tobunken.go.jp, world-archaeology.com

The Buddha of lapis light

In Buddhism lapis is the colour of healing. The Medicine Buddha, Bhaisajyaguru, is called the King of Lapis Lazuli Light, and his sutra describes a pure eastern land made of lapis. He is usually painted with deep blue skin and his body is said to glow like the stone.

In Qing dynasty China, lapis was part of the strict rules for court dress. The emperor's court necklaces could include lapis, called qingjinshi or blue-gold stone, alongside pearls, coral and turquoise. Collectors' notes going back to the scholar Soame Jenyns say the emperor wore lapis beads when he made sacrifices at the Temple of Heaven, where blue stood for the sky.

• Medicine Buddha: King of Lapis Lazuli Light
• Sanskrit word: Vaidurya, usually read as lapis
• Chinese name: Qingjinshi, blue-gold stone

Sources: en.wikipedia.org, publikace.nm.cz, woolleyandwallis.co.uk

Cennini's recipe: how to wash blue out of a rock

Around 1400 the Florentine painter Cennino Cennini wrote a handbook for artists that includes the classic method for making ultramarine. For every pound of ground lapis, melt together six ounces of pine rosin, three of gum mastic and three of new wax, strain it through linen, and knead it into the powder to make a stiff dough. Grease your hands with linseed oil so it does not stick.

Then wait. The dough rests at least three days, worked a little each day, and can be kept for weeks. Finally you knead it with two wooden sticks in a basin of warm lye. The pure blue lazurite slips out into the lye and the grey rock stays trapped in the wax. The first washes give the best, deepest blue; later washes give paler grades.

If poor stone gave a violet blue, Cennini had a fix: tint it with a crimson boiled from kermes and brazilwood. Modern restorers who try the recipe say it is much harder than it reads.

• Lapis: 1 pound
• Pine rosin: 6 ounces
• Gum mastic: 3 ounces
• New wax: 3 ounces
• Rest time: At least 3 days

Sources: drypigment.net, naturalpigments.com, mitra.artcons.artsci.udel.edu

Paintings that showed off their blue

In the Wilton Diptych, painted for King Richard II of England in the 1390s, the Virgin's robe and the robes of all eleven angels around her are ultramarine. The National Gallery in London points out that a whole crowd in lapis blue made the little altarpiece a treasure in its own right.

Titian went bigger. In Bacchus and Ariadne, from about 1520 to 1523, he spread ultramarine across the whole sky, the sea and Ariadne's robe. The National Gallery's guide describes it as a deliberate display of the patron's wealth, using a pigment far more expensive than any other. The stars above Ariadne are her crown, thrown into the sky to become the constellation Corona Borealis.

• Wilton Diptych: About 1395 to 1399
• Bacchus and Ariadne: Titian, about 1520 to 1523
• Both in: The National Gallery, London

Sources: en.wikipedia.org, nationalgallery.org.uk, nationalgallery.org.uk, en.wikipedia.org

Lapis treasures of princes and emperors

In 1583 Grand Duke Francesco I de' Medici had a flask carved from a single block of lapis to a design by Bernardo Buontalenti, about 40 cm tall, with gold mounts by the goldsmith Jacques Bylivelt. It still has the date and his initials on the base. It survives in the Treasury of the Grand Dukes at the Pitti Palace, even though the gallery's first caretaker stole its precious parts in the 1700s; they were recovered in 1768.

In 1588 the Medici founded a stone workshop, the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, largely to decorate their family mausoleum, the Chapel of the Princes, with walls of inlaid lapis, coral and mother of pearl. The work went on for more than two centuries.

In India, Shah Jahan's craftsmen set Afghan lapis into the white marble of the Taj Mahal as flowers and vines. In Russia, Charles Cameron's Lyons Hall for Catherine the Great at Tsarskoye Selo used Lake Baikal lapis for its doors and panels; after it was wrecked in the Second World War it was rebuilt, and the museum says it holds about 2.5 tonnes of lapis.

• Medici lapis flask: 1583, Pitti Palace, Florence
• Opificio founded: 1588
• Taj Mahal: Afghan lapis in the marble inlay
• Lyons Hall: Catherine Palace, about 2.5 tonnes of lapis

Sources: uffizi.it, wikipedia.classicistranieri.com, italyguides.it, 4cs.gia.edu, en.wikipedia.org, gazprom.com

Chile's mine above the clouds

Most lapis sold outside Afghanistan comes from a single deposit high in the Chilean Andes, the Flor de los Andes mine in the Coquimbo region, about 3,500 m up near the town of Ovalle. It has been worked since 1905, and snow closes it in winter, so mining happens only in the summer months.

GIA researchers found Chilean lapis is a mix of lazurite with wollastonite, calcite, hauyne, diopside and pyrite, which is why it tends to be lighter and greyer than Afghan stone with more white in it. About 150 tonnes come out each year, much of it cut in Chile into jewellery, carvings, tabletops and tiles. The best pieces, GIA says, come close to fine Afghan lapis.

• Mine: Flor de los Andes, Coquimbo, Chile
• Altitude: About 3,500 m
• Mined since: 1905
• Output: About 150 tonnes a year

Sources: gia.edu, mindat.org, diariodecuyo.com.ar

Lapis and war in Afghanistan today

The ancient mines are still worked, in Kuran wa Munjan district of Badakhshan, and they have become a prize in Afghanistan's wars. A two-year Global Witness investigation, published in June 2016, estimated that armed groups including the Taliban took about 20 million dollars from lapis in 2013 and 12 million in 2014, while the government lost out on similar sums.

A Kabul-licensed company won the lapis contract in 2013, but local strongmen pushed it out and ran the mines themselves. Global Witness called the mines one of the richest assets of the Afghan people and warned they were funding conflict. For buyers this is one more reason to prefer sellers who can say where their lapis comes from.

The name lives on in diplomacy too. In November 2017 Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey signed the Lapis Lazuli Corridor agreement, a road, rail and ferry route to Europe named after the old lapis trade.

• Report: Global Witness, June 2016
• To armed groups: About $20m (2013), $12m (2014)
• Mines: Kuran wa Munjan, Badakhshan
• Lapis Lazuli Corridor: Signed November 2017

Sources: globalwitness.org, globalinitiative.net, newsecuritybeat.org, civil.ge