Fact File: The Queen Wore Green
Cleopatra (69-30 BC), the bold and beautiful queen of Egypt who was the lover of Julius Caesar and wife of Mark Antony, is known as history's first and still best-known celebrity devotee of emeralds.
Is she entitled to this reputation?
No emeralds known to have belonged to her have survived. Yet she is as associated with emerald as Princess Diana was with sapphire. Further, her emeralds were said to have come from her own country, at four main deposits located in the hills inland from the Red Sea.
Quite frankly, we were skeptical about Egypt as the major emerald source of antiquity. Moreover, we had far more reason to believe that the green stones Cleopatra wore were more likely peridots from a well-documented, long-productive deposit on St. John's Island, 60 miles off Egypt's coast. These peridots, which were mined well into the 20th century, are often quite lovely while ancient emeralds tend to be pale and cloudy. If given a choice of homeland gems, we felt sure her highness would have preferred its peridot.
Confusing matters more is the fact that gemological identification didn't become an exact chemical science until the late 18th century. Hence the word we know today as 'emerald' is a catchall color term taken from the Greek word smardagus for green that served as a name for gems of that color used by the ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean.
To allay our doubts, we took them to Peter Bancroft, author of Gem and Mineral Treasures, which is a collection of essays based on first-hand observation of 200 mines around the world. He reassured us that Egypt was a significant producer of emeralds during - and long after - Cleopatra's reign. What's more, he was emphatic that Egyptian emeralds could have been distinguished from Egyptian peridot. In short, Egypt was an ancient, as well as primary, source of emerald and Cleopatra wore them as long believed.
We found a second confirmation in a superb article, "Emerald and Green Beryls of Upper Egypt," published in the Summer 1993 issue of GIA's Gems & Gemology. The authors personally visited the four best-known emerald deposit in Egypt and found evidence of mining dating back at least as far as Cleopatra.
Today, of course, Egyptian emerald, which is mined in small quantities by Bedouin Arabs, is mostly a curiosity - of far more historical than aesthetic value.
Nevertheless, here is a rare case where gem myth is based on truth.
