The History of Amethyst
This article traces the history of amethyst, from the mines of ancient Egypt to the Greek and Roman writers who first described it, the manuscripts that carried their words into the Middle Ages, and John Hill, the eighteenth-century translator whose notes are still copied today.
Five Thousand Years of Amethyst
Amethyst has been mined, worn, faked, prayed over and written about for five thousand years. Much of what is published about its history has been copied from one website to another. Therefore, it's easy to take what you read as fact. Information is rarely checked against the original sources before being republished.
Amethyst in Ancient Egypt
Amethyst beads have been found in Egyptian graves dating to before 3000 BC. By the Middle Kingdom, around 2000 to 1700 BC, amethyst was highly sought-after.
The pharaohs sent mining expeditions to Wadi el-Hudi, a remote site in the Eastern Desert south-east of Aswan. Inscriptions made at the time record the participants and the reigning pharaoh.
Amethyst from these mines was cut into beads, amulets and scarabs. Some of the finest surviving pieces come from the jewellery of royal women buried at Dahshur and Lahun.
Egyptian craftsmen also knew how to imitate precious stones. Pliny the Elder, Roman author, naturalist, scientist, and military commander of the early Roman Empire, writing in the first century AD, says that tinting stones to imitate the blue stone he calls cyanus was a famous achievement of the kings of Egypt.
Cyanus was sometimes identified with azurite, although its precise modern identity remains uncertain. He even states that their records name the first king to do this, although his name isn't revealed.
Elsewhere, Pliny says treatises existed explaining how to turn rock crystal into emerald and other gems by means of dyes, and that no other fraud was practised on society with greater profit.
A later surviving example of this tradition is the Stockholm Papyrus, a Greek recipe book compiled in Egypt around AD 300, which contains instructions on imitating precious stones.
The Egyptians also imitated stones using glass. John Kitto's Cyclopaedia of Biblical Literature (1846) states that ornaments of glass were being made in Egypt around 1500 BC, and that "such was the skill of the Egyptians in this manufacture, that they successfully counterfeited the amethyst, and other precious stones."
The High Priest's Breastplate
Amethyst is one of the twelve stones in the High Priest's breastplate. In the book of Exodus, it's the ninth stone, third in the third row. Its Hebrew name is achlamah (אַחְלָמָה). The ancient Greek translation of Exodus, made in the third century BC, rendered it as amethystos, and amethyst has been the traditional identification ever since.
In its entry on amethyst, Kitto's Cyclopaedia states that "the concurrence of various circumstances leave little doubt that the stone anciently known as the amethyst is really denoted by the Hebrew word".
Kitto was a self-taught, profoundly deaf English biblical scholar and writer.
Theophrastus and the First Book on Stones
The earliest surviving Greek work on minerals is 'On Stones' by Theophrastus, a pupil of Aristotle. It was written around 315 BC. The translation I've used is by Earle R. Caley and John F. C. Richards (1956).
On Stones isn't a record of newly discovered materials; it's an attempt to classify those that were already widely used.
Many of the stones he describes were already being quarried, mined, worked or traded. He talks of marble from Paros; a green stone from the Cyprus copper mines; sard for seal rings; ochre for painters, and cinnabar, which was refined by an Athenian called Kallias about ninety years earlier.
Cinnabar is mercury sulphide, the ore of mercury. Grinding it fills the air with dust that is poisonous to breathe. Theophrastus doesn't mention this, but Pliny records that the workers who processed it covered their faces with loose bladder skins to keep the dust out.
What was new about Theophrastus's On Stones was the thinking: sorting stones by how they behave rather than by their supposed powers, though he doesn't avoid the old beliefs entirely.
He opens his work by saying, "Of the substances formed in the ground, some are made of water and some of earth. The metals obtained by mining, such as silver, gold, and so on, come from water."
He then distinguishes stones by properties such as hardness, fusibility and how different stones respond to heat. He says, "Some of them melt and become fluid when subjected to fire, such as those which come from mines." Others do the opposite: "there are many which break and fly into pieces as if they are fighting against being burnt, like pottery."
The Liparean stone "is made porous when it is burnt, and becomes like pumice," and another "seems to be of an exactly opposite nature, since it cannot be burnt."
Amethyst appears only twice. In one passage, Theophrastus writes: "There is also rock crystal, and the amethyst, and both of them are transparent; and these two and the sardion are found when certain rocks are cut through."
In the next section he adds that "the amethyst is wine-colored."
The word in his Greek text is "amethyson", a variant of "amethystos." So Theophrastus knew it as a transparent stone the colour of wine, found inside other rock, like rock crystal and sard.
How On Stones Survived
No original manuscript of On Stones survives. The work has come down through copies of copies made by later scribes.
When scholars call On Stones the oldest surviving treatise on minerals, they mean the oldest whose text has been passed down through the ages, not the oldest document. How it was passed down is a chain with several weak or missing links.
Theophrastus wrote at the Lyceum, the school in Athens he took over from Aristotle. According to the geographer Strabo, writing three centuries later, the Lyceum's library passed to Theophrastus's pupil Neleus, whose heirs hid the books in a cellar at Scepsis in Asia Minor to keep them from the book-collecting kings of Pergamon. They remained there, while being damaged by damp and worms, until a collector bought them in the first century BC and brought them back to Athens.
From there, the Roman general Sulla transported them to Rome in 86 BC. That's Strabo's story of the library as a whole; how much of it is true is debated. What is certain is that copies of Theophrastus's work reached Rome.
Pliny the Elder read On Stones and reproduced material from it, which shows the work was still available in the first century AD.
Like most Greek texts, it owes its survival to copying in Byzantium, where scribes in the ninth and tenth centuries transferred old texts into the new book hand of the day.
The earliest surviving copies are medieval. The most important are in the Vatican Library.
On Stones was first printed in Venice in 1497, in the Aldine Aristotle. In 1511, when Cuspinianus published The Lapidary of Marbode, he was already complaining in his preface that Theophrastus's book on stones had reached his generation "lacer", torn or mutilated.
John Hill made the first translation into any modern language in 1746, restoring the Greek where he could and comparing it with Pliny. Caley and Richards, in 1956, did the same with two more centuries of scholarship behind them.
Amethyst in Pliny's Naturalis Historia
The most comprehensive ancient account of amethyst is in Book 37 of Pliny's Naturalis Historia, published in AD 77.
Pliny grouped most gemstones by colour. The purple group is one of the smallest. Within it, Pliny puts amethyst first, followed by a stone he calls hyacinthus, which had a weaker violet colour than amethyst but cannot be matched with certainty to one modern mineral. Lapis lazuli, which he calls sapphirus, is dealt with just before, among the blue stones.
Pliny states that the best amethyst is from India, but it was also found in the part of Arabia around Petra, in Lesser Armenia, Egypt and Galatia, with the poorest stones from Thasos and Cyprus.
He describes it as being "of an agreeable violet colour, and easy to engrave". The Indian stone had the perfect shade of Tyrian purple, the most expensive dye in the ancient world; Pliny says it is "to attain this colour that the dyers in purple direct all their endeavours". Amethysts have "a fine mellowed appearance to the eye."
He adds that they do not dazzle the sight like the colours of the carbunculus.
Pliny lists five kinds of amethyst. The first was the stone from India. Another shaded towards hyacinthus. One was paler, while another had the colour of wine. The fifth faded towards rock crystal and was the least valued, because a fine amethyst held up to the light should show a rosy glow within the purple.
Pliny also records an ancient treatment and two forms of imitation. He says gems were made brighter by being boiled in honey, particularly Corsican honey, which was too bitter for any other use.
He also says the Indians stained rock crystal to counterfeit beryl, and that amber, which could be tinted any colour, was used above all to make artificial amethyst.
Caley and Richards say in their first footnote that the usual translation of smaragdos is emerald, but that this is not the word's exact meaning. In Pliny, the name covered twelve varieties, probably representing several different green minerals, and only some have been identified as true emerald.
Others may have been malachite, chrysocolla or green jasper, though the stones the ancients knew as chrysocolla and jasper may not have been the ones we know by those names today.
Amethyst in the Middle Ages
Medieval lapidaries, the books that catalogued stones and their magical powers, drew heavily on Pliny's work. The most influential was De lapidibus, by Marbode of Rennes, a poem of about 60 stones and their supposed powers that was copied and translated across Europe for centuries.
Amethyst came to be associated with sobriety and piety, making it a natural choice for the Church. Bishops wore amethyst rings, and the stone still appears in ecclesiastical dress today.
John Hill and the Two Amethysts
The first translation of Theophrastus's On Stones into a modern language was by the English naturalist John Hill in 1746.
Hill added long notes of his own, describing what was known about each stone at that time.
His note on amethyst says its colour comes from iron, which is broadly correct. He says it's found in cracks and layers of rock, and sometimes, like rock crystal, inside hollow balls of stone, which describes a geode.
He says jewellers divided amethyst into two kinds, Oriental and Occidental, the Oriental being scarce, hard and beautiful, the Occidental coming mainly from Saxony and Bohemia, with some good examples found in England.
Hill also records that heat removed the colour from stones then sold as amethyst. His claim that the resulting stone could imitate diamond refers specifically to Oriental amethyst, or purple corundum:
"The Amethyst loses its Colour in the Fire, like the Sapphire and Emerald: The Oriental Kind, divested of its Colour by this Means, comes out with the true Lustre and Water of the Diamond; and is so nice a Counterfeit of it, that even a very expert Jeweller may be deceived by it."
The capital letters are how English was printed in the eighteenth century. "Water" was the jewellers' word for a gem's clarity, and "nice" meant exact. So he is saying that the Oriental amethyst, once heated, is such a good imitation of a diamond that it can fool an expert jeweller.
The Oriental amethyst he describes is not the amethyst we know today. In the expanded 1774 edition, Hill's mineral list calls it "Purple Sapphire", while the purple quartz that is amethyst, he calls "Occidental Amethyst". Hill lists Oriental amethyst with the sapphires and Occidental amethyst with rock crystal.
When some sapphires are heated, as the colour fades, you can get a colourless stone that could pass for a diamond. When amethyst is heated, the colour may fade, disappear or turn yellow.
A jeweller in 1746 could tell an Oriental amethyst from an Occidental amethyst by hardness and lustre, which is why two names were used. It had long been understood that amethyst was a type of rock crystal.
The two were told apart by their physical properties long before their chemical compositions were known. Only once corundum and quartz had been analysed could it be said that they were separate minerals rather than two grades of the same stone.
The name amethyst was being applied to two purple stones with very different physical properties.
One hundred years later, Kitto's Cyclopaedia repeated Hill's note almost word for word. The Oriental amethyst "is very scarce, and of great hardness, lustre, and beauty", and "like other sapphires, it loses its colour in the fire, and comes out with so much of the lustre and colour of the diamond, that the most experienced jeweller may be deceived by it".
Kitto names Hill's notes among his sources, but by 1846 the chemistry was known, so he could add detail that was unknown to Hill.
This included that the Oriental amethyst was "a rare variety of the adamantine spar, or corundum", of which the sapphire is the blue form. The Occidental amethyst "is a variety of quartz, or rock crystal". He also uses Pliny's remark that amethysts were easy to cut to argue that the amethyst of the ancients was quartz.
Article Pictures
The first photograph is a still from the television broadcast of the coronation of King Charles III at Westminster Abbey in May 2023. It's included because the cope worn by the Archbishop of Canterbury is fastened at the chest with a clasp, known as a morse, set with purple stones, almost certainly amethyst.
The second photo is the title page of the 1774 second edition of Theophrastus's History of Stones by Sir John Hill.
Pop-up photos
Azurite: Courtesy of Ron Wolf. Pumice: Courtesy of Stan Celestian. Sard: Stone Mania. These photos link to the original images on Flickr. You may only be able to view them if you join. Joining Flickr is free, with no additional charges.
The remaining pieces are from our collection.
