Once Upon a Gemstone - Issue 10 : Mergers & Acquisitions
▻http://nautil.us/issue/10/mergers--acquisitions/once-upon-a-gemstone
For longer than recorded history, gemstones have been used to tell stories. Passed down through generations, they carry the legends of our ancestral past. They also carry with them a much, much older history: the geological echoes of our planet’s very formation. As shifts deep within the Earth’s core drove its tectonic plates, compression, heat, and chemical reactions created a new set of minerals, beautiful to the human eye. Understanding that these were objects of record, of permanence, humans wove their own, new stories around them, making meaning from mystery. Peridot of the splitting sea The island of Zabargad in the Red Sea has been home to the world’s finest specimens of peridot for as long as 3,500 years, since its mines were first worked for Egyptian Pharaohs. The island was (...)