Gems & Gemmology: ancient origins and tales from the East

By Richa Goyal Sikri – GemGenève, May 2025

It all began with a slight frustration. At a GemGenève conference the previous year, Richa Goyal Sikri had eagerly taken her seat for a talk promising to explore “the origins of gemmology.” The subject could not have been richer. However, as the speaker progressed, it became clear that the story would begin – and end – in 19th-century Europe. There was no Egypt. No China. No India. No Persia. None of the civilisations that had, for millennia, known, classified, and cherished gemstones with a sophistication Europe would only later acquire.

Sikri decided that if the whole story were to be told, she would have to tell it herself. And so, armed with years of travel, research, and her own compulsion to collect stories, she began piecing together a different history — one that reached back thousands of years, crossing deserts, rivers, and empires.

Before Europe Knew

Her journey into the distant past started with a simple human instinct: the desire to control one’s world. Long before cities or kingdoms, people sought mastery over the forces that governed life, especially the sun. Its rising and setting determined survival, and civilisations paid it homage through art, architecture, and jewellery.

In China, jade bi disks — perfect circles with a central hole — first appeared around 7,000 years ago, symbolising the sun’s daily cycle. In Egypt, the tips of obelisks were gilded to catch the first light of dawn. In India, Surya, the sun god, presided over the rhythms of life. These were not mere decorations: they were statements of cosmic alignment, rendered in enduring materials.

From Tools to Treasures

The earliest use of stone was practical. In prehistoric China, powdered corundum served as an abrasive. Nephrite axe blades — some dating back 7,000 years — improved the efficiency of daily labour. Yet even these tools were crafted with an aesthetic sensibility.

Ancient Egypt provides remarkable examples. A 4,600-year-old stone jar, discovered in a tomb and likely used for storing precious oils, features a lid made of hammered gold, shaped to resemble a tied cloth — complete with folds and rope, carved in meticulous detail. It resembles a cover one might place over a vessel at home, here elevated into a work of precious metal. The choice of stone, with its natural veining, was intentional, making the material itself an integral part of the design. Gold, sourced from the rich deposits of Upper Egypt, is often found alongside carnelian, lapis lazuli, and turquoise — materials that, in ancient Egyptian culture, were not only beautiful but also held significant symbolic meaning.

Jewellery often served dual roles, both as adornment and as a functional object. A signet ring from India’s Kadamba dynasty bore the emblem of the sacred bull Nandi and was used to seal official documents. In Egypt, a pectoral worn by a royal princess, crafted 4,000 years ago, incorporated protective cobras, the falcon deity Horus, and the life-giving waters of the Nile into a visual message of divine favour and everlasting life.

Ancient Systems of Value

The way we classify gemstones today into “precious” and “semi-precious” has origins far older than most realise. In India’s Ratna-Pariksha, written 2,400 years ago, diamonds, pearls, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and blue chrysoberyl were ranked as maharatna — great gems — while topaz, coral, lapis lazuli, and others were upratna, secondary stones. This was not purely about beauty; it reflected density, hardness, and rarity.

China’s Tang dynasty used gemstones to signal rank: first-rank mandarins wore rubies and pink tourmalines; fourth-rank officials wore rock crystal. In ancient India, colour preferences were also prescribed: merchants wore the deep, “pigeon’s blood” red rubies that we now consider supreme, while royalty and scholars wore lighter, more open tones. That taste, Sikri noted, is still embedded in Indian buying habits today.

Stones for Protection and Faith

Many gems were valued as much for their supposed powers as for their appearance. One of the most striking examples Sikri shared was an antique domed emerald — a cabochon, smooth and rounded — set in a ring designed so that the Qur’anic verses engraved on its underside would rest directly against the wearer’s skin. The effect was both intimate and deliberate: the sacred words would be in constant contact with the body.

She read the inscription aloud to the audience:

“And whoever fears God, He will make for him a way out and will provide for him from where he does not expect. And whoever relies upon God, He is sufficient for him. God will accomplish His purpose. God has already set for everything a decree extent.”

A verse of reassurance and divine promise, it had, she admitted, become a personal touchstone. “I always get goosebumps when I read this one,” she said, recalling how, during the pandemic, she kept returning to it — a reminder that one does not always have to understand everything in life. In that way, the emerald was more than a relic; it was a portable shield of faith, resonating across centuries from its first owner to a modern gemmologist reflecting on life’s uncertainties.

Not all materials were natural. Egyptian faience, a quartz-based ceramic that glazed itself during firing, mimicked the celestial blue of turquoise when the real stone was scarce. The innovation enabled large-scale production of jewellery for royal burials, ensuring that the symbolic colour was always present.

Knowledge Before Science

Some of the terms and concepts that gemmologists learn today — such as cleavage, brilliance, and hardness — first appeared centuries ago. In 13th-century Tunisia, Ahmad ibn Yusuf al-Tifashi compiled a gem treatise whose hardness scale matches Mohs’ 19th-century version in order, if not in numbering.

Similarly, the East distinguished spinel from ruby long before Western science did. In Persia, spinels were valued above diamonds for their “sunset” glow. In India, they were called balas rubies, likened to the crimson of the morning sun. Mughal treasury books listed them separately, recognising their distinct beauty.

An ancient Indian verse, Sikri observed, could still serve as a buyer’s checklist:

“Good gems are hexagonal, rectangular or circular in shape, pure in colour, easily settable in jewellery, unblemished, smooth, heavy, lustrous, transparent, and reflecting light from inside.”

The African Chapters

The second half of Sikri’s narrative leapt forward in time but stayed on the same thread: the movement of gem knowledge and gem wealth across continents. Africa, she reminded the audience, is today the source of most coloured gemstones in the market. Yet many of its deposits were only discovered in the past half-century, despite being geologically ancient.

Her stories from this modern period — many drawn from her book No Stone Unturned — were full of the same mix of character, adventure, and tradecraft as the ancient accounts.

In 1968, German gem trader Julian Pesch rediscovered Madagascar’s renowned tourmaline deposit, producing crystals so perfect they could be sliced like cucumbers. His find was more than an isolated stroke of luck — it continued a centuries-old tradition from his hometown of Idar-Oberstein, Germany. For over 400 years, this small town had been a major centre for gemstone cutting and trading, initially working with local agates and quartz. As those sources dwindled, traders from the town started exploring worldwide for new deposits. Pesch’s return from Madagascar with Liddicoatite tourmaline was part of that same tradition: raw gems travelling from distant mines back to Idar-Oberstein’s skilled cutters, maintaining the town’s reputation on the global stage.

Scottish geologist Campbell Bridges, working in East Africa, discovered the vivid green garnet later named tsavorite — a stone with the sparkle of diamond and the hue of emerald, found only in Tanzania and Kenya.

And then there was Shankar Gupta, an Indian trader who in the 1960s owned South Africa’s largest emerald mine — an astonishing fact in the era of apartheid. Later, moving into Zambia, Gupta channelled the vast quantities of rough emerald he acquired into Jaipur, which at the time had only a handful of small, traditional cutting workshops. He imported modern gem-cutting machinery, trained new cutters — many of whom were drawn from outside the established gem trade — and expanded the workforce from a few hundred to hundreds of thousands. In just a few years, Jaipur was transformed into one of the world’s leading emerald-cutting centres, a legacy that still shapes the city’s industry today.

Mozambique, now the world’s leading source of rubies, only entered large-scale production in the 2000s. Its gem story, Sikri said, is inseparable from the country’s long struggle for independence and peace — a reminder that behind every stone is a human history.

The Story Continues

In closing, Sikri reminded her audience that the categories, preferences, and beliefs we attach to gems today often carry the imprint of ancient civilisations. From a jade bi disk in Neolithic China to a parcel of tsavorite in modern Nairobi, the thread is unbroken.

She ended with a line written in 16th-century Goa by a Spanish observer, still accurate in the high-security halls of modern gem fairs:

“The value of stones is no more than the will of buyers and the need for them.”

 

Speaker:

Richa Goyal Sikri (Journalist, Storyteller, Author and Gemmologist)