Quartz Matrix Embedded with Emeralds
Origination: Afghanistan
Approximate: Height - 11" - Width - 16" - Depth - 10"
Quartz Matrix Embedded with Emeralds: $15,000.00 U.S.D.
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Extraordinary large and beautiful museum-quality emerald embedded in a quartz matrix with large amount of emerald druse specimen. One of the most intriguing examples of this huge unexploited wealth is Afghanistan's emerald industry.
There are extraordinarily rich veins of this precious green gemstone running through the Panjshir Valley and the mountains of the Hindu Kush that lie around 150 miles northeast of the capital - stones of a quality to rival the very best available from Colombia and Zambia from where most of the world's supply currently emanates.
One of the most intriguing examples of this huge unexploited wealth is Afghanistan's emerald industry.There are extraordinarily rich veins of this precious green gemstone running through the Panjshir Valley and the mountains of the Hindu Kush that lie around 150 miles northeast of the capital - stones of a quality to rival the very best available from Colombia and Zambia from where most of the world’s supply currently emanates.The Afghan emerald is renowned as the best in terms of quality…one of the most crystalline, one of the purest," he explained while meeting a Panjshiri trader who had come down to Kabul to show the Frenchman a few samples. But there was a problem - the way the gems were extracted. "It leads to this," he said, holding up a glittering green splinter. "Stones that are completely smashed up.Most authorities believe that the only true emeralds lznown during ancient Greek and Roman times were from Egypt (Sinlzankas, 198 1). However, in his first-century A.D. Natural History, Pliny mentions "smamgdus" from Bactria (Gall, 1959), an area that includes present-day Iran and Afghanistan (Malte-Brun, 1828). Smaragdus is a Latin term that was used in ancient times to refer to emerald and many other green stones. It is questionable, though, whether any of the smnragdus from Bactria was emerald.
After Pliny, there is a void in the literature on gems of Afghanistan until approximately 1300 A.D., when the report of Marco Polo's travels of 1265 A.D. first appeared. Marco Polo mentioned silver mines, ruby, and azure (lapis lazuli) from Badalzhshan.Little is lznown about mining in the Panjshir (also spelled Panisher) area from the time of Marco Polo until the 1900s. During the last 100 years, geologists from Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Canada, and the United States have produced many reports (see, e.g., Hayden, 1916; Argand, 1924; Bordet and Boutiere, 1968; and Emeralds From Afghanistan Chmyriov and Mirzad, 1972) on the geology of Afghanistan, but virtually nothing had been written on the emerald deposits prior to 1976. In the early 1970~~ emerald was discovered at what is now called the Buzmal mine, east of Dest-e-Rewat village in the Panjshir Valley (Bariand and Poullen, 1978). At about the same time, Soviet geologists began a systematic survey of Afghanistan's gem sources. Although this resulted in a number of publications (Rossovslziy et al., 1976; Abdullah et al., 1977; Rossovslziy, 1981; Chmyriov et al., 19821, the most detailed reports were not released. Following the death in 1973 of President Daoud, political changes hindered geologic work throughout Afghanistan. Nonetheless, in 1977 the naines and locations of emerald mines in Panjshir were listed in a report by the United Nations Development Program (Neilson and Gannon, 1977).
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