The Sapphire, between ancient persian legends and the Bible history
In the visions of the glory of God, Ezekiel saw twice “the likeness of a throne” that was “similar to the stone Sapphire”.
Welcome between antiquity and mystery, today we will talk about a stone from the Arabian Nights: the Sapphire belongs to the family of corundum and comes in a wide variety of colors: pink, orange, green, yellow, purple and black, but the intense blue is the most valuable.
In the Bible, the lovely color of sapphires was used figuratively to describe the visions of the glory of God, “under the feet of Jehovah (God) there was what looked like a work of sapphire slabs and purity as the heavens themselves “. Also for its color, the Sapphire was connected to the concept of infinity of the universe. The ancient people of the Persians liked to call the Sapphire” lazvard “, literally” that has the color of clear sky “they believed that the fact earth was leaning on a huge Sapphire, whose reflection gave the color blue to the sky, so as to call the stone also the “eye of the sky“.
An ancient Persian tale tells us that the sons of the king of Serendip (Sri Lanka) were sent on a journey to experience the reality of the world. The three young princes discovered wonderful things, among them a mine of sapphires. From this legend comes the origin of the English concept of “Serendipity” that means the amazing luck in finding unexpectedly valuable things while you are turning attention to something else. Sri Lanka today is the most important source of mining sapphires in the world. The area of greatest production is, in fact, in the south-eastern part of Sri Lanka island at about 60 kilometers from Ratnapura (“city of gems“).
Sri Lanka was not the only famour ancient mining source mining: there were others, such as the region of Kashmir where a mine is renowned in the past for the color quality of its gems (the famous “cornflower blue of Kashmir “), today almost totally depleted. Today the major mining centers that produces sapphires are in Thailand (in the provinces of Chanthaburi and Battambong), Cambodia, Vietnam, China, Africa, Madagascar.
