History, culture & symbolism

Gems traveled farther than almost any other goods because they packed great value into little weight. Lapis lazuli from Badakhshan in northeast Afghanistan reached Mesopotamia by about 3500 BCE; Georgina Herrmann's study of the early trade names Badakhshan as the only probable source of the lapis found in Mesopotamian graves, some 1,500 miles away across desert and mountain. The overland networks later called the Silk Road took shape between the 2nd century BCE and the 1st century CE and stayed in use until the 16th century, linking Chang'an and Luoyang to Central Asia.

India supplied the world's diamonds until Brazilian deposits were found in the early 18th century. The French merchant Jean-Baptiste Tavernier made six journeys between 1630 and 1668 and described four mines around Golconda: Rammalakota, Kollur, Soumelpour in Bengal and Kistna. Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and Pegu in Burma shipped rubies, sapphires and rock crystal; Badakhshan sent spinel, Persia turquoise, and Colombia emeralds carried east through European hands.

After the Portuguese reached India in 1498, Goa became the leading gem port of Asia, and the road from Goa to Agra, 1,667 km inland, fed the Mughal court. Tavernier wrote that Goa once held the largest trade in Asia in diamonds, rubies, sapphires and topaz. The map below sets out six of these corridors.

The Book of Exodus (chapter 28) describes a breastpiece for the high priest Aaron set with twelve stones in four rows, one for each tribe of Israel. The Hebrew names are hard to match to modern minerals: the King James Version gives the first row as sardius, topaz and carbuncle. Ancient terms did not follow modern definitions: Pliny's sapphirus, an opaque azure stone refulgent with spots like gold and best from Media, is lapis lazuli with pyrite.

The Book of Revelation (21:19-20) rests the wall of the heavenly Jerusalem on twelve jeweled foundations, from jasper and sapphire to jacinth and amethyst. The first-century historian Josephus said of the twelve stones that whether one understands by them the months or the signs of the zodiac, one will not mistake their meaning. That reading underlies later birthstone customs.

In Hindu astrology the navaratna, or nine gems, assigns a stone to each celestial body of the Navagraha: ruby for the Sun, pearl for the Moon, red coral for Mars, emerald for Mercury, yellow sapphire for Jupiter, diamond for Venus, blue sapphire for Saturn, hessonite for Rahu and cat's eye chrysoberyl for Ketu. The ruby sits at the center. The V&A's catalogue groups five maharatnani (diamond, pearl, ruby, sapphire, emerald) and four uparatnani (jacinth, topaz, cat's eye, coral), though these may vary. Astrological gem prescriptions are cultural and religious beliefs; no controlled study shows a stone changes its wearer's fortune.

The modern birthstone list used in the United States is a trade convention, not an ancient canon. The custom of wearing the stone of one's birth month is usually traced to early modern Germany or Poland. Jewelers of America, the national retail trade body, dates the official list to 1912 and to the association that became the modern organization, and the table below reproduces the list it published as of 2026. Several months carry more than one stone, which gives buyers a choice of color and price. Other bodies list other stones: GIA gives bloodstone for March and sardonyx for August, neither of which appears on the Jewelers of America list, so a jeweler's chart may not match this one.

The list has been revised since 1912, but the dates of the later additions are widely repeated in the trade without appearing in the association's own material, so they are left out here.

Zodiac stones have no agreed standard: jewelers, astrologers and publishers assign different gems to the same sign. Anniversary gems are conventions too. English-language lists commonly pair ruby with the 40th wedding anniversary, sapphire with the 45th, alexandrite with the 55th and diamond with the 60th, the association behind the term diamond jubilee, which Queen Victoria marked in 1897 after 60 years on the throne. GIA, whose list nicknames the 55th stone emerald by day, ruby by night, says there is no single authoritative source on the subject.

Rulers used gems as wealth that could be worn, carried, pledged and inherited, and coronation regalia turned that wealth into ceremony. The British Crown Jewels, held at the Tower of London since the 1660s, run to more than 100 objects set with some 23,000 stones. The Imperial State Crown carries 2,868 diamonds, 17 sapphires, 11 emeralds and 269 pearls, with Cullinan II at the front of the band and a large oval sapphire at the back. The Cullinan, found in South Africa in 1905 as a 3,106 ct rough, yielded the two largest stones in the sceptre and that crown.

Gems also moved with conquest. The Koh-i-Noor came from Indian mines and passed through many owners before the ten-year-old Maharaja Duleep Singh surrendered it to the East India Company under the Treaty of Lahore in 1849, at the close of the Anglo-Sikh wars; it was presented to Queen Victoria the year after, in 1850. Recut in 1852, it now weighs 105.6 ct and sits in the crown made for the coronation of George VI in 1937 and worn by his consort, Queen Elizabeth.

Mughal emperors did the same in their own idiom, drawing rubies and sapphires from Ceylon and Pegu, spinel from Badakhshan and emeralds carried east from Colombia, and inscribing their gems so that the stones recorded the dynasty that owned them.

Curse stories attach easily to large stones with violent histories, but the best-known examples are modern inventions. The Hope diamond, a 45.52 ct blue diamond at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, descends from a stone that Jean-Baptiste Tavernier sold to Louis XIV in 1668. Recut as the French Blue, it was stolen with the French crown jewels in 1792 and reappeared, cut down again, in London by 1812, later taking the name of the banker Henry Philip Hope.

The Smithsonian traces the curse to the early 20th century. Newspapers invented earlier owners who met terrible ends, the actress May Yohé promoted the tale, and the jeweler Pierre Cartier embellished the stone's history when he sold it to the Washington socialite Evalyn Walsh McLean. The Smithsonian dates the sale to January 1911; its collection record dates the transfer to 1912. When tragedies later struck the McLean family, the press presented them as proof. Harry Winston donated the diamond to the Smithsonian on November 10, 1958, by registered mail.

The Koh-i-Noor carries a different legend: that it brings misfortune to any man who wears it, while women are safe. The story circulated in 19th-century Britain, and no early documentary basis for it has been produced. Since it reached Britain it has been set in crowns worn by queens and queens consort, and it now sits in the 1937 crown shown with the Crown Jewels at the Tower of London.

Crystal healing is the belief that quartz points, amethyst clusters and other stones can improve physical or emotional health when held, worn or placed on the body, supposedly by transmitting or balancing a form of energy. It draws on much older lapidary traditions, books that assigned medicinal virtues to each stone, and it spread through English-speaking countries with the New Age movement of the late 20th century.

No scientific evidence supports crystal healing. The energies and vibrations that practitioners describe do not correspond to any measurable physical quantity, and ideas such as blocked chakras have no basis in physiology. The few published tests are small, and none has shown an effect that survives comparison with suggestion.

The belief still shapes parts of the gem market, from tumbled stones to jewelry sold with claims about calm or protection. In the United States the Federal Trade Commission requires health claims in advertising to rest on competent and reliable scientific evidence, which its guidance of December 20, 2022 defines as tests or studies conducted and evaluated objectively by experts in the relevant field and generally accepted as yielding accurate results. Sellers who promise relief from anxiety, pain or illness fall under that standard. This encyclopedia describes metaphysical properties only as beliefs held by some people.

Amulets are among the oldest uses of gems. Ancient Egyptians wore and buried protective charms of carnelian, lapis lazuli and turquoise, including scarabs and the eye of Horus. Pliny the Elder recorded with derision the claim of the Magi that amethyst kept its wearer from drunkenness; he traced the name instead to the stone's color, close to wine and then fading into violet. Protective traditions continue in evil-eye charms and navaratna jewelry; there is no evidence that stones protect their wearers.

Mourning jewelry commemorates the dead. Pieces made for mourning appeared in the 16th century, when memento mori rings with skulls and inscriptions reminded wearers of mortality. By the 17th century mourning rings often carried a person's name and death date, and wills set aside money to buy rings for relatives and friends.

The fashion peaked in Victorian Britain. After Prince Albert died in 1861, Queen Victoria stayed in mourning dress for the rest of her life, and black jewelry became expected of bereaved women who could afford it. Jet, a hard black fossilized wood found on the Yorkshire coast around Whitby, was the favored material. Whitby Museum counts over 200 jet factories employing 1,500 people at the height of the industry, between 1860 and 1880, supplied by 300 mines. Cheaper substitutes included black glass, sold as French jet, and vulcanite. Hairwork jewelry woven from a loved one's hair was also common. Elaborate mourning customs faded after World War I.

Fiction often treats a gem as the object everyone wants, which lets a story pass it from hand to hand. Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868), serialized in Charles Dickens's magazine All the Year Round, concerns a sacred Indian diamond seized during the 1799 siege of Seringapatam. Left to a young Englishwoman, Rachel Verinder, it vanishes on the night of her eighteenth birthday, and several narrators, along with Sergeant Cuff of Scotland Yard, try to explain the theft. T. S. Eliot later ranked it as the first and best of modern English detective novels.

Ian Fleming's Diamonds Are Forever (1956) sends James Bond after a smuggling chain that moves stones from Sierra Leone through London to the United States. Fleming drew on conversations with Sir Percy Sillitoe, a former head of MI5 then working for De Beers. The 1971 film with Sean Connery keeps the smuggling idea but adds a satellite weapon powered by diamonds.

Edward Zwick's Blood Diamond (2006) is set during Sierra Leone's civil war in 1999: a fisherman forced to dig for diamonds hides a large pink stone, and a smuggler played by Leonardo DiCaprio joins his search for it. The film earned five Academy Award nominations and brought conflict diamonds to a wide audience. Josh and Benny Safdie's Uncut Gems (2019) follows Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler), a New York Diamond District jeweler with gambling debts, who stakes everything on a rough black opal smuggled from Ethiopia.

Three court cultures set standards jewelers study. The Mughal emperors, who ruled much of the subcontinent from 1526, blended Indian, Persian and Central Asian traditions. Their workshops set stones in kundan, packing refined gold foil around each gem, enameled jewel backs, carved emeralds, inscribed gems with imperial names and inlaid white jade with gold and rubies. A white nephrite wine cup made for Shah Jahan in 1657, gourd-shaped with a ram's-head handle, is in the V&A as IS.12-1962.

In Renaissance and early 17th-century Europe, goldsmiths made enameled pendants, hat badges and cameos for courts that treated jewelry as display. The Cheapside Hoard, about 500 jewels and gems found near St Paul's in June 1912 and probably buried around 1640, shows how far that trade reached. It holds Colombian emeralds, Indian rubies and diamonds, Persian turquoise and Afghan lapis lazuli, and a gold watch inside a hollowed emerald. Most is at the London Museum, with 25 at the British Museum and five at the V&A.

Imperial Russia commissioned on the grandest scale. Besides regalia, the St Petersburg firm of Carl Faberge made imperial Easter eggs for Alexander III and Nicholas II, beginning with the 1885 Hen Egg for Maria Feodorovna. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts counts fifty-two, the Royal Collection fifty. Ten went to Alexander III; fifty were delivered, the last pair in 1916, and two begun for 1917 never left the workshop. Many held a hidden surprise.