hands of craftsmen who produced for a less elite clientele) and that emulation of high
status individuals by those of lower status may have been a potent mechanism for
the appearance of lapis across a broad social spectrum.
Carnelian (Mohs 6. 5 ), on the other hand, seems to have arrived after manufacture
in the workshops of India. Gujarat remains the most important source of carnelian
in the world (Tosi 1980 : 448 ), and most of the long, barrel-shaped and smaller,
etched beads that appeared in Mesopotamia during the late third millennium BCare
without doubt actual products of Harappan (Indus Valley civilization) craftsmen
(Reade 1979 ). The warm, almost blood-red colour of carnelian beads has made them
popular for millennia, and some of the rich burials in the Royal Cemetery at Ur, for
example, contained hundreds of them. Less well known, however, is the fact that
carnelian beads were extremely common in the Neo-Babylonian period as well (Limper
1988 ), a time for which we otherwise lack sources on Indus–Babylonian trade.
The ability to work hard stones developed in Babylonia through time. It is clear,
for example, that softer stones, such as calcite (Mohs 3 ) and marble, were used more
frequently for cylinder seals in the late fourth and early third millennia BC, and that
these were probably engraved using stone drill bits (Gorelick and Gwinnett 1989 :
46 ). By the Old Babylonian period, haematite (Mohs 6. 5 ) accounted for over three-
quarters of all cylinder seals, and these can only have been fashioned using metal
(bronze) drill bits aided by the introduction of emery as an abrasive (Gorelick and
Gwinnett 1990 : 53 ).
White-striped agate was frequently used to fashion so-called ‘eye stones’. These
circular discs of stone, cut so that the white stripe runs around the perimeter of the
other, often brown, stone, were commonly used as votive offerings, clearly demonstrated
by the inscribed dedications to deities. The elite nature of such eye stones is
demonstrated by the fact that a number of them were dedicated by Old Babylonian
(Warad-Sin, Abi-eshuh), Kassite (Kurigalzu, Kadashman-Enlil), Assyrian (Sargon II)
and Babylonian (Nebuchadnezzar II) kings to a variety of deities (e.g. Nanna, Ningal,
Ninurta, Ninlil, Adad, Nusku, Marduk, Nergal, Sarpanitum, Nabu and Enlil; see
Lambert 1969 ). Similarly, onyx beads were also known in Babylonia. An inscription
on one such bead shows that it was received as a gift from the son of the rebellious
Chaldaean chieftain Merodach-Baladan by the palace of Sennacherib (Frahm 1999 :
90 ). It is unclear where the Chaldaeans acquired their onyx but the fact that other,
comparable beads of agate, chalcedony and onyx were acquired by the Assyrians from
Arabian chieftains suggests that the Arabian peninsula may have provided the sources
for these semi-precious stones.
As the evidence of cylinder seals and beads made of rare stones (not necessarily
semi-precious, but geologically rare) attests, many other stones from outside of
Babylonia were put to use in antiquity, but although a modern mineralogical
identification may be possible, the majority of the ancient names for different types
of stones mentioned in cuneiform sources remain unidentified (cf. al-Rawi and Black
1983 ). A first-millennium BCtext known as ‘The stone whose nature is.. .’ gives
us some tantalizing descriptions of stones ‘whose nature is like the coat of a date-
palm’, ‘whose nature is like an owl’s coat’, ‘whose nature is like a clear sky’, or ‘whose
nature is like a mouse’s ear’ (Postgate 1997 : 217 ), along with their Akkadian names,
but we are far from being able to attach a petrological designation to these poetically
described minerals.
— Babylonian sources of exotic raw materials —