The Diamond Timeline

Our word diamond reaches back to the Greek adamas, the unconquerable. To the ancient mind the stone stood for invulnerability, for healing, for protection from harm; the modern eye reduces all that to three plainer measures — wealth, durability, quality. Between those two ways of seeing lie four thousand years, and the story opens far from Antwerp, in the gravels of an Indian river.

Ca. 400 BCE — The first diamonds in India

The oldest surviving mention of the stone sits in a Sanskrit treatise on statecraft and commerce, the Arthasastra — The Lesson of Profit — compiled by Kautiliya somewhere between 320 and 296 BCE. What is remarkable is how exactly its author already grades the gem by the very properties a modern buyer still weighs:

A diamond that is big, heavy, capable of bearing blows, with symmetrical points, capable of scratching from the inside a glass vessel filled with water, revolving like a spindle and brilliantly shining is excellent. That with points lost, without edges and defective on one side is bad. — Arthasastra, Kautiliya, ca. 320—296 BCE

Yet the diamond served as tool well before it served as ornament. Excavations in Yemen have turned up beads drilled with diamond-tipped points, the work assigned by archaeologists to the fourth century BCE. The Sanskrit vocabulary keeps the same martial heat as the Greek: vajra, the thunderbolt, and indrayudha, Indra’s own weapon. For two millennia after, every diamond in trade came from India alone — a monopoly that held until 1725.

The name through antiquity

Tracing the stone through antiquity is awkward work, because the word adamas was used for more than one substance. Theophrastus (ca. 372—322 BCE), a pupil of Plato, applied it in his De lapidibus — On Stones — not to diamond but to emery: the corundum that stands hardest of all minerals once diamond itself is set aside. It fell to Pliny the Elder, writing some four hundred years later in the Historia naturalis (77—79 CE), to fix the stone’s worth in words that have never quite been bettered:

The substance that possesses the greatest value, not only among precious stones, but of all human possessions, is adamas; a mineral which for a long time was known to kings only, and to very few of them. These stones are tested upon the anvil, and will resist the blow to such an extent as to make the iron rebound and the very anvil split asunder. — Pliny the Elder, Historia naturalis

Ca. 1300 — The first trade routes to Europe

Across the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the diamond starts to surface in the jewels of Europe. Venice held the first of the trade, and it was there, at some point after 1330, that craftsmen began the earliest experiments — easing the natural crystal faces into shape and taking the damaged points off the rough. From there the trade spread north. Antwerp would become its capital only later; first the stones passed through Bruges and Paris, both dealing in them before the fourteenth century closed. When Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1499, a direct sea road to India opened for the first time, and Goa rose as the Portuguese entrepôt. Stones now made the long passage from Goa to Lisbon and on to Antwerp — a thin annual flow of one to two thousand carats that lasted until 1725.

1475 — The early round brilliant is born

The year 1475 brings the Scaif: a rotating wheel dressed with a paste of olive oil and diamond powder, devised by Lodewyk van Berken of Bruges. The wheel carried a radical principle with it — that facets ought to be set with perfect, deliberate symmetry. Almost a century later, in 1565, Benvenuto Cellini set down the first account in writing of the tools a diamond-polisher used. The art of coaxing light out of the stone was under way.

17th century — Jean-Baptiste Tavernier

Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, a French gem-dealer with a traveller’s appetite, became the first European to reach — and to record — the diamond country of India. Across six published voyages he described the workings near Golconda, the stones that came out of them, and the legends each one gathered along the way. The greatest prize he carried back to Europe was a deep blue diamond that the world now knows as the Hope.

A new era — Brazil, Africa and Russia

Year	Event	Effect on production
1725	New deposits found in Brazil	Lisbon imports rise from 1,000—2,000 to 100,000—200,000 carats
1867	Secondary deposits found in South Africa	The African era begins
1870	First primary deposits at Kimberley	Rough production climbs steadily
1877	—	1.8 million carats
1892	—	3 million carats
1913	—	6 million carats
1949	Russian deposits found in Siberia	A further 15 million carats added to world output

What began as one line in a Sanskrit manuscript ends in the frozen ground of Siberia. Read whole, the diamond’s history is the patient unsealing of a secret once kept for kings — until the unbreakable stone, known so long to a handful of monarchs, came to be the most recognised gem on earth.