History of Gemstone Cutting

Lapidary - a person who fashions colored stones

Before ancient ancestors wore clothes, they decked themselves with jewelry fashioned from products of the hunt - teeth, claws, bones, antlers, feathers, and shells.  These materials were soft and easy to work with.  In their struggle for survival, Stone Age humans learned to shape rocks and other hard materials as tools and weapons, by simply chipping them.  When color, marking, or form were striking, they used them as religious or magic objects, or for personal decoration. Some of the earliest fashioning techniques for rocks were probably the same as for wood and bone, scratching and drilling.  People later learned to polish stones by rubbing them with abrasives like river sand.  (Sand is mostly quartz and will abrade anything of Mohs hardness 7 or less.)  This not only enhanced surface luster but sometimes revealed a transparent, vividly colored interior beneath a dull, frosted surface. Slowly, more elaborate techniques evolved.  Around 3000 BC, Mesopotamians were using primitive lapidary wheels to shape and polish gems.  They had no hard abrasives, but most gems available to them - turquoise, chalcedony, lapis lazuli - were soft enough to fashion with sand. Gem carving techniques developed early in China.  Ceremonial jade objects carved in simple designs were buried with the dead before 3000 BC.  By the Zhou Dynasty (112 to 256 BC), lapidaries were carving nephrite jade, chalcedony, serpentine, and many other gem materials into functional, decorative, and ceremonial forms.  With few interruptions, gem carving has remained an important part of Chinese art ever since. When the Roman Empire opened trade routes linking Europe and Asia, goods flowed freely.  Among them were new gems - ruby, sapphire, topaz, chrysoberyl, and diamond - to hard to fashion with quartz sand abrasive.  Another important trade product was emery, or granulated massive corundum (Mohs hardness 9).  With this people could cut harder stones. The first diamonds that reached Europe and the Far East from India (the only ancient source) were probably used for lapidary cutting tools, rather than as gems.  Diamond crystals and fragments with sharp points were mounted in wooden stems for engraving designs in seals and intaglios. By the first century AD, lapidaries from Spain to China were using files made with resin and emery, bow saws made of metal wire strung between the ends of a bowed stick, and diamond-tipped gravers.  Many of these tools remained basically unchanged until the twentieth century. Ancient lapidaries cut flat faces on tablets and scarabs to provide surfaces for engraving, but they did not produce the faceted forms we associate with transparent gems today.  Most transparent crystals were merely polished.  Since color was their main asset, this was enough. Diamond-the hardness known material-was the first gemstone to be routinely faceted (starting probably in Europe around 1300).  When lapidaries saw how faceting revealed the brilliance and beauty of colorless diamond, they began to facet colored gemstones too. Today, the techniques for fashioning stones are basically like those used in Egypt, China, and Greece 2000 years ago.  We lapidaries have a wider assortment of specialized tools and abrasives.  We inherit centuries of experience in gem cutting and glean knowledge from scientific research in optics and gemology.