The Goldsmith – Jeweler Of Egypt

(via 5000 Years of Gems and Jewelry) Frances Rogers and Alice Beard writes:

6. The Lapidary And His Tools
The name given to the craftsman who cuts and engraves small stones is ‘lapidary,’ from lapis, the Latin word for stone. The Egyptian jeweler and his fellow craftsman in Babylonia were highly skilled in engraving minute figures on extremely hard stones. Their tools were simple but effective. Splinters of flint and fragments of emery stone were used on the softer stones, the design being scratched freehand on the surface. For engraving the harder gems, rotary tools were necessary, and those used were quite similar to some of the wheel-tools of today. There were drills ending in rounded points, disks, etc., which were made to rotate by means of a wheel or bow. The actual cutting of the gem was not done by the metal drill, however, but by the emery powder that was ground against the stone by the revolving tip.

The fact that his material might be exceedingly hard and his tools so primitive that cutting stone must have taken countless hours and endless patience did not prevent the lapidary from making fine bowls from black diorite, one of the hardest of stones. The walls of these bowls he ground down to such a degree of thinness that they were translucent in sunlight.

Another task given to the lapidary, not exactly in the line of jewelry, was the making of artificial eyes, not, however, to be worn by human beings.

Portrait sculpture in Egypt was carried to a point of realism never since excelled. When the sculptor carved his lifelike heads from wood or stone, he painted them in full color, and between their unblinking lids the lapidary set eyes of rock crystal with pupils of black stone. The effect of these gleaming eyes was startling in the extreme. Sometimes the sculptor worked not with the stone or wood but with bronze, which he shaped by hammering over wooden forms. Today the royal portrait of King Peri of the Pyramid Age still glares serenely, the undimmed eyes of rock crystal set in a bronze face which time has encrusted with rust.

The Goldsmith – Jeweler Of Egypt (continued)