Heaven in the Rock: The Lapis Road

Luxury is a matter of social convention, driven naturally by a commodity's rarity and quality, but above all by a given culture's system of values, appreciation and symbolism. Different societies held different substances to be highly valuable while regarding others as mundane. The history of luxury goes back to the earliest well-defined human cultures, although our understanding of its early social and commercial context remains incomplete, owing to the obvious lack of written material and the perishable nature of possible finds. Prehistoric evidence does show that as early as the Neolithic, flints of unusual shade and sea shells were valued merely for their rarity, and thus travelled far from their place of origin by the sheer force of human imagination — even if the full scope of that early network is still missing.

After the Neolithic revolution, as human societies began to take complex social and political shapes, new appreciations and demands came into being. One of the best-known luxury items of the earliest civilisations is a matter of curiosity, owing not only to its prestige as a commodity but also to the manner in which it travelled and came to be prized.

A rock with a single source

Lapis lazuli is a rock formed under specific metamorphic conditions, containing considerable amounts of the blue mineral lazurite along with other minerals such as calcite and pyrite, which appear on the surface of the stone as spots and streaks of white and gold. Lapis was appreciated in the ancient world for its intense ultramarine colour, and specimens of pure blue, free of impurities, were the most sought after. The stone's vivid colour, as well as its relative softness, made it a desired item among the cultures of the ancient Near East, mostly in Mesopotamia and Egypt, where it was used for personal and monumental adornment. Its origin, however, lies nowhere near those centres of early human culture.

There are very few known deposits of lapis in the Old World, and although the ancient chronicles tell of lapis mines in western Egypt and south-western Iran, the only confirmed deposits lie near Lake Baikal, in the Pamirs and, above all, in Afghanistan. Badakhshan, in what is today north-eastern Afghanistan, was indeed the only significant source of lapis lazuli in the ancient world. From a few scattered mines high in the Hindu Kush came the entire supply of high-quality lapis for the cultural centres of India, Mesopotamia, Egypt and later Greece.

The mine at Sar-i-Sang, in the Kuran wa Munjan district, is perhaps the oldest still-active mine in the world; its oldest shafts were most probably the ones supplying high-quality lapis to the treasure houses of Ur, as well as for the burial mask of the child pharaoh Tutankhamun. Active only a few months a year because of harsh weather, and historically worked by simple means such as fire-cracking, the mines yielded chunks of blue stone chiselled out of the mountainside, only to be dispatched in the rough to their faceless consumers far away.

Aratta and the seven mountain ranges

Ancient Sumerian accounts tell of Aratta, a powerful kingdom to the north-east of Sumer, noted not only as the home of Inanna, goddess of war, love and fertility, but also as an exceptionally prosperous land, rich in precious metals and gems and in artisans qualified to work them — lapis lazuli among them.

While modern scholarship has failed to prove the existence or location of Aratta, the mention of lapis working north-east of Sumer indicates a possible trade route running all the way from Badakhshan, through the Iranian highlands, to the city-states of Mesopotamia. That general direction is a matter of simple geographical sense, but firm confirmation of the exact route had to be backed by archaeological evidence. The excavation of several major lapis-processing centres on the Iranian plateau gave a better understanding of how the routes functioned. Tepe Hissar, a Bronze Age settlement south of Damghan in north-eastern Iran, where large deposits of lapis waste flakes were found, indicates a major local industry.

Trade is highly sensitive to geopolitical change — warfare, political crisis and other calamities can easily disturb, halt or divert commercial activity along a given path. In the history of the lapis trade, evidence shows that unknown events in Iran brought it to a complete halt during the early third millennium BC, depriving the Fertile Crescent and the Nile valley of their lapis supply for some two centuries. Those long-lost events may echo in the Sumerian account known as Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta.

“Let them… pure lapis lazuli from the slab… / Of the holy giparru where you established your dwelling. / May the people of Aratta fashion artfully its interior.” (Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, 38–64)

In this epic composition, Enmerkar, king of the Sumerian city-state of Uruk, wished to adorn a new temple for the goddess Inanna with the compulsory lapis lazuli. The king of Aratta, said to lie seven mountain ranges east of Sumer, preferred to hoard the lapis rather than trade it with his remote neighbours, threatening a genuine crisis of theological interior design in the cities of Sumer. The account tells us that only after Aratta was struck by a famine sent by Inanna herself, and after Uruk sent grain in aid, was the export of lapis allowed to continue.

This lovely story may lack factual ground, but it may reflect the Sumerian age-long thirst for the prestigious stone during those “lapis dark ages”. The lapis crisis brought much agony to the Mesopotamian elites, but it also brought later fortune to another riverine culture far to the east, and opened yet another trade route.

By monsoon instead

The Harappan culture, a well-developed urban world and part of the so-called Indus Valley Civilisation, was among the most sophisticated of early human cultures, known for sewage systems almost unrivalled until the modern age. The mysterious events on the Iranian plateau that disturbed the earlier land routes eventually led to a southbound flow of lapis down to the Harappan markets. Surprisingly, the Harappans appear not to have been impressed by these brilliant blue stones and rarely used them; instead they were happy to pass them westwards, with the willing monsoon winds, to their eager neighbours in Mesopotamia.

The Dilmunite trade is confirmed by Sumerian and later Akkadian, Assyrian and Babylonian accounts, and it seems that this small kingdom was an important station on the ancient maritime routes for most of the last few millennia BC, acting as a portal for luxury goods arriving from the Indian coast and High Asia — as shown by finds of lapis objects, but also ivory, pearls, carnelian, turquoise and other substances.

What an imperishable object can prove

A good few millennia have passed since the heyday of the ancient lapis trade. The Sumerians, Akkadians and Babylonians have all made way for other nations holding other appreciations. More important than admiration of its artistic and historical use is what the lapis trade can tell us about the way early Eurasian trade systems functioned. Being largely imperishable, lapis beads, artefacts and fragments help us identify trade patterns, ancient industrial centres and cultural connections where other items — textiles, foodstuffs and other organic materials — cannot.

It is important to emphasise that the idea of a “lapis road”, much like other famous “roads”, is valid only as a framing term, useful for defining a trade system limited in time and space. Other resilient commodities such as pottery, metals and stones also help define an early world trade network, showing that the so-called lapis road was merely a fraction of an immense prehistoric and early historic web connecting communities from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean, from Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean shore and even north to the Baltic coast. These patterns were of course indirect, but they are powerful testimony to early human connection, which in turn helped to redesign human settlements and both imaginative and material culture.

The blue stone of the Sumerian myths may long have fallen out of favour before other, more sought-after gems, but its memory still echoes in ancient chronicles, poems and masterpieces of the past — a brilliant example of how the human imagination can make even rocks travel.