Welcome, welcome everyone
… come on in. Thanks for joining me for another episode of “Tea & Gemstones.” This is your home for a shiny mix of social commentary and fun history of all things sparkly. This is a place to gush – and critique- modern red carpets, and design trends, learn the science behind a gemstone, revel in the history of famous masterworks of jewelry, indulge in the drama of royal treasuries or the thrill of a jewelry heist, and so much more. Anything and everything involving jewelry is welcome here. And as always, I am your host, Jen.
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I have a toddler who asks a million questions. As a parent, you fall into this pattern of being asked a random question and then trying to explain an answer. I became familiar with the process of trying- not to “dumb down”- but to simplify lots of information into engaging, informative, educational content. Hey- if I can keep a four-year-old listening and learning then I am succeeding. Being in the presence of my child’s constant appetite for knowledge awoke me to the stagnation of my own brain, if I’m being honest. Raising a newborn, up to like… about three and a half, I was just totally dazed. It takes every bit of energy and focus to just live basic life, I wasn’t dabbling in mental extracurriculars. But now she’s older, and I have remembered: I like to learn too! Finding answers to my daughter’s questions stirred alive my own thirst for well, explai
ning… teaching. I like to call it “productive talking.” We all know what really specific topics makes a person in our lives light up- they just love talking about their favorite niche subject; airplanes, stock options, interior design, gardening- even if the subject isn’t your own bee’s knees, it is just fun sometimes to talk and listen to people passionately explain what they care about. That’s what has happened with this next subject for me. Once I started working on this topic, it sprawled out so big, this has actually turned into Tea and Gemstones first ever series. I’m calling it, “A Casual History of Gold.” Which is kind of an oxymoron, because the entire history of gold is a huge, big thing… but c’mon… Imma keep it casual. So, I hope “A Casual History of Gold” feels like I am your nerdy casual historian friend who has a lifelong magpie affinity
for shiny things, and I’ve set up in your living room with a glass of wine to ramble excitedly about gold. I hope it’s fun, I hope you learn, and I sincerely hope it sparks you to ask and answer your own random questions. Okay… This is part one, let’s kick it off.
Let’s play a word association game. I’ll say a common phrase- and you see what word your brain automatically fills into the blank.
“Baby, you’re good as ------_”
“All that glitters is not ____”
“You’re worth your weight in ____”
“C’mon team, let’s go for the ----”
Okay, is your mind filled with thoughts of… gold?? Then you’re among the company of about all mankind. Humans have been obsessed with gold since the beginning of recorded history, and I’m guessing a good way back before then too. Humans first discovered gold over 30,000 years ago. I mean, gold has been found on every continent of the earth except Antarctica. And the
shiny yellow stuff has been a permanent focus of our personal stories, treasures, economies, royalty, and religions.
So here we go: W
e are following a golden thread through history. Gold has been connected to the history of mankind since before history was ever written down. It motivated wars, justified conquests, spurred exploration, facilitated commerce, inspired artistic masterpieces, invoked religious reverence, and yielded scientific discoveries. And of course, became the most enduring, iconic form of jewelry of all time.
Well, we have laid out a broad, vast scope, haven’t we? Did you ever consider gold to be so tied to history? I think for a lot of people whenever the topic of gold comes up, their mind goes to money. But if you thought gold was mostly a topic for like, stocks and bonds, investments and money market talk, a report in 2011 stated that actually 50% of all new gold pulled from the Earth is
used in jewelry. A nice big fun number from a different report is: two hundred and one thousand two hundred and ninety-six tons… that’s the consensus of how much gold exists “above ground” as of 2020. In the last ten years, 25,800 tons of that above ground gold went to jewelry. But using gold in jewelry is not a modern trend. Guess what? Over 3,000 years ago in Ancient Egypt the first archeological discovery of man using gold, was gold jewelry.
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I think we have to
back up in our history of gold. Back waaaaay up. We’re talking about gold being above ground, below ground, hanging in chains around our necks, sitting as rings on our fingers, coins in our pockets… but I’m getting ahead of myself. Hey, where in fact did Earth’s tons of gold really come from? What is gold’s very beginning, before it’s on the stock market, in a jewelry box, waiting to be discovered in a California riverbed? Where is gold born? Well, on a clear dark evening, you can go outside and look upwards, to gaze upon the star mothers who can birth gold into creation… Yeah, this isn’t me trying to spin together a silly metaphor, gold… guys, it came from *space*.
Yall ready to get science-y? This is gonna get deliciously science-y. Gold knew how to make an entrance. There really is no more explosive way to come into existence than via ‘supernova nucleosynthesis’. Supernova nucleosynthesis is when a huge star, one in a size category ten times bigger than our Sun- that huge star explodes. But before they explode outwards, they star
t self-destructing at the center with what scientists call “an internal shockwave” massive progressive destruction from the core outwards, with the star falling apart like an evil villain’s fortress at the end of a Marvel movie. During the internal melting and collapsing, new elements are synthesized (that means created) from all the raw materials mixing in the guts of the dying star. Then, the star explodes and all those new elements, --like gold, are sent on the ultimate express mail service, distributed all across the literal universe. So that’s one space theory about the birth of gold, a star melts down internally and explodes outwards.
A second theory is called a “neutron star merger”, when giant stars actually crash into each other and mix together, and gold and a bunch of other heavy elements are created. In August 2017, scientists actually witnessed this phenomenon. The Astrophysical Journal published a report detailing stars three times larger than our sun, colliding and smashing into each other a mere 85 to 160 million light years away. Scientists ran models of the collision and released data that they believe the neutron star merger yielded quote, “between 3 and 13 earth masses of gold.” End quote. An earth mass means equals to the entire weight of the planet earth. So…. I’m picturing huge, massive planets of solid gold exploding into existence and somehow that idea is not that u
nrealistic. Man, I love science.
So, whether it is via ‘supernova nucleosynthesis’ or a ‘neutron star merger’, the answer to “where does gold come from?” is…. Outer Space haha! And scientists believe, way way waayyyy back when our home planet was literally putting itself together, a huge meteorite, loaded with freshly born gold from a supernova or a star merger, crashed into the still melty, mushy, in process of being formed planet Earth’s core. It was like the universe planted a seed in the ground, the Earth had been given an interplanetary direct deposit of gold into the center of itself. Some scientists believe the gold in Earth’s core has been pushed upwards into the mantle and crust over billions of years. Other scientists believe a hypothesis that most of the gold we humans h
ave mined and found was delivered into the shallower top of the formed Earth about 4 billion years ago, during a time called the Late Heavy Bombardment. The Late Heavy Bombardment is a name given to a period where the Earth was supposedly pummeled with about twenty-two thousand asteroids, seeding the earth’s surface with all the world’s gold supply. The Late Heavy Bombardment is a theory that faces a lot of criticism for a bunch of really specific geological reasons, but without getting too much off focus… our takeaway point is… gold is born in space, and somehow, and some point in the past, gold was delivered to Earth via meteorite.
Alright. The Earth is golden, baby. So, who had the honor of discovering the precious stuff?
The earliest recorded metal used by humans is gold. Experts in fossil study have found bits of whole natural gold on Spanish cave floors dating back over 40,000 years ago to the Paleolithic time. Historical sources can’t agree on the actual uses of the ancient gold, but those cavemen had themselves some bling. The cavemen were able to have gold because gold is unique in that it can be found free, or “native”. That means gold can exist in its pure metallic form in nature- like whole gold nuggets in a riverbed. Only gold, silver, copper, and platinum occur native in large amounts because they are the only metals that can resist natural weathering l
ike oxidation. Native metals were prehistoric man’s only access to metal, until the process of smelting didn’t come onto the scene till a few thousand years later. Smelting is when you super heat up ore, the host rock holding the metal- to get the metal out. But gold can be found on its own- and in Ancient Egypt, it was abundant.
Like I mentioned before, we have archeological artifacts of gold jewelry dating back to 3000 BC. Egypt gave us o
ur first recorded gold map. Spoiler alert- everywhere. Ancient Egypt had gold…. Evvverywhere. Egyptian hieroglyphs from 2600 B.C record an Egyptian pharaoh (that’s what they called their kings) claiming gold was “more plentiful than dirt.” We all know what Egypt’s physical landscape is like… it is A LOT of sand and dirt. And apparently also gold. Abundantly gold. Egyptians believed gold was the flesh of their sun god, Ra. They actually called the metal, “the skin of the gods.” Because of gold’s revered status, initially only pharaohs were allowed to wear it. It was considered state property. But as time went on over the centuries, there was so much gold the pharaohs decided it wouldn’t hurt to spread it around. Next priests were allowed to wear it and eventually, the general population. If you had the money, you got t
o have gold. As Egyptian civilization progressed through the ages, we see the abundant resource of gold permeate all of society.
It isn’t hard to see why ancient people fell in love with gold. Gold as a material is easy to love. Gold is very malleable, which means it can be bent, hammered, pressed and molded without breaking or cracking,
making it perfect for any shape. If you just keep hammering gold, it will get thinner and thinner and thinner… gold leaf can go as thin as one micron. One amazing example of gold leaf from ancient Egypt was found in a tomb of an Egyptian noble named Hapiankhtifi (hay-peh-in-ti-fi). His mummy wore an elaborate broad collar necklace across his whole chest. The collar was carved from wood as a base, but the entire swooping curve was covered in the thinnest of thin gold leaf, etched with a tiny grid pattern. Egyptian goldsmiths would adhere the gold leaf to the wood with a plaster gum mix made from plants. If you can think it, dream it, imagine it, then the ancient Egyptians probably made it out of gold. We have artifacts of statues, vases, beads, all forms of jewelry, bowls, cups and plates, hair ornaments… Egypt had so much gold, they even used it to make doors, floors and pillars in their palaces and temples.
We have so many amazing pieces of gold from the ancient Egyptians because of their funerary habits… namely, they buried people with their best stuff, like the nobleman with his fancy collar necklace I just mentioned. They believed whatever went into your grave with you would be transported to your personal afterlife. So, take your favorite bling, you’ll get to use it for eternity. But the treasure Egyptians put inside tombs went far, far up the grandeur scale than a necklace. Because while sort of ‘regular’ people- their graves would yield some jewelry, a trinket, maybe a religious ornament… but the real jackpots, the real jackpots were the tombs of the pharaohs.
The centuries long, on-going quest for ancient Egyptian treasures is full of interesting characters. The motivation of gold and treasure brings the most interesting people into documented history. The first archeological hunt for treasure – not just grave robbing- kicked off in 1798 when Napoleon Bonaparte brought not only 35,000 soldiers, but also 160 artists and scientists to Egypt. Napoleon was there to quote “protect French trade interests” aka- he wanted to harass the heck out of the British in India and he brought the nerds along for good propaganda- like “look I’m not actually sort of conquering; we’re exploring for science and history!” And even though his goals really were military minded, he did let the explorers do their thing. And they made lots of discoveries, including the Rosetta Stone in 1799, which allowed for the translation of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. But in 1801 the British made Napoleon stop messing around and kicked him and all his forces out of Egypt and they took the Rosetta Stone. It
’s been on display in the British Museum from 1802 until present day. But besides the revolutionary Rosetta Stone, Napoleon’s “nerds” within their first year had discovered 16 tombs, though they were devoid of golden goods and their original mummified owners long since stolen. After these first discoveries, the 1800s really kicked off European’s Egyptian treasure hunting obsession. I mean- A new profession developed, you could go become an Egyptologist; a job description combining being an archaeologist, historian and linguist engaged in the study of ancient Egypt and it’s antiquities. But if you were an Egyptologist, basically an academic treasure hunter, you wanted to put your feet to sand and go exploring. Think of the technology of this time frame, the risks, the diseases there are no vaccines for… the crocodiles and hippos of the Nile alone would give me pause. So, the type of person who feels the pull of undiscovered gold- looking at the circumstances of how to even start to find it- and decides, “yeah, I can deal with that, all the risks and uncertainty is worth the possible reward” that type of explorer person is so interesting to me. There’s Giovanni Belzoni, a 6-foot 8-inch former traveling circus strongman who even when he was exploring in Egypt still introduced himself by his circus stage name, “the great Belzoni.” Belzoni famously transported huge statutes that stumped other’s attempts and he discovered the tomb of Ramesses I in 1817 and was first to get into one of the pyramids of Giza. Belzoni had to keep looking over his shoulder though, he had a hostile rival named Bernardino Drovetti. Drovetti was a notorious Italian antiquities collector suspected of sabotaging and stealing from other’s
endeavors. There was also a man named Colonel Howard Vyse. He was born in England in 1784. He served in the military for a while… hence the “colonel” title and tried his hand at being a politician, but he got in trouble for buying all his votes. So, he decided to go to Egypt in 1835 and he started what the records state is “gunpowder archaeology.” Basically, he blew up ancient monuments looking for treasure. He used boring rods to drill 27 feet deep into side of the Great Sphinx, inserted dynamite and blew off huge chunks looking for a burial treasure chamber. He also blew up the sides of a couple pyramids before running out of money and going back home to his nine children. Without the lure of gold and treasure, w
ould men like the great Belzoni be recorded in our history books?
So yeah, the people responding to the call of treasure could be a little… colorful. And the first 130 years or so of Egyptian treasure hunting had yielded some insights into the treasures possible. But every tomb found had long ago been ransacked and robbed. So truly, we did not know the capacity to which the pharaohs adored and utilized gold until the discovery of a guy I think you’ve all heard of… King Tut.
King Tut was found because of the dogged determination of a guy named Howard Carter. He was a British arc
haeologist and Egyptologist born in 1874. He was the youngest of eleven children and from an early age he displayed a talent for painting and drawing. When he was only 17, he was hired to go to Egypt and document tomb decorations. Carter fell in love with Egypt and obsessed with the idea of finding lost tombs. In 1907, Carter was hired by a wealthy British aristocrat named Lord Carnarvon. Carnarvon was an amateur Egyptologist who had a lot of old school family wealth, and he used that money to buy dig permits and fund treasure hunts. For five years, Lord Carnarvon paid all the bills and Carter dug all over the Valley of the Kings… but they didn’t find anything. The Lord was about to pull the plug when in 1922, one of the water boys on Carter’s team discovered a stone step in the sand. And viola- history was made.
King Tut’s tomb was unique because it was discovered intact and previously undisturbed. All other royal tombs found in Egypt had long ago been ransacked by robbers. But King Tut’s tomb held all it’s golden treasures safe inside, including a gold chariot, gold chair, jewelry and an inner coffin ma
de of solid gold. One of the chambers of his tomb was guarded by two life-sized golden statues of the pharaoh. King Tut himself wore into death a spectacular solid gold death mask with lapis lazuli detail. That death mask was made of 22 pounds of gold. A classic women’s gold wedding band is about 5 grams of gold, so you could make about 2,000 rings out of King Tut’s mask. The exotic discovery of King Tut’s tomb triggered a period of jewelry design historians call “Egyptian Revival” where jewelry houses such as Tiffany & Co, Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels created whole collections in gold and gemstones based on Egyptian antiquity, proving the golden designs from thousands of years ago can inspire modern gold creations.
It is fascinating to me that when King Tut’s tomb was first discovered, everyone was like “look at the insane, amazing wealth of the ancient pharaohs!” Which is absolutely true, yes. But! But without any other intact unrobbed tombs to compare King Tut too, historians now believe Tut’s tomb and it’s golden contents were small town scale compared to what a pharaoh’s tomb could be. Look at the physical space of the tomb. Tut’s is a few small rooms, cut into rock. Egyptologists believe this tomb was actually intended for a lesser lord or noble, not the pharaoh god on earth. But when King Tut died unexpectedly so young, this small tomb was the only place ready at the time. Look at the sheer massive scale of the Great Pyramids. Those three enormous triangles are tombs for pharaohs. Imagine what gold artifacts were buried in those tombs. So yes, not to diminish the amazing-ness of King Tut’s swag; but I mentally drool over the unrealized possibilities of the scale of treasures we will never get to see. Unless there’s a new discovery of an intact tomb. Wouldn’t that be awesome? It would be lovely just for the sake of comparison… yes… that’s why I want see more masterworks of ancient Egyptian gold… for you know… the data haha
So, King Tut’s tomb yielded the information of all the objects Egyptians could create in gold. But, with the revered status of gold, the skin of the gods, in ancient Egypt, they did not use gold as money- th
ey actually used barley and other agricultural goods as currency. The first known use of gold in coin form was in 600 BC in Lydia, Asia Minor, which is present-day Turkey. The world’s oldest gold coin is called a “Lydia Lion” because, well, it is stamped with a roaring lion impression on one side of it. It’s 4.7 grams and is actually a gold and silver alloy called “electrum.” Electrum can occur naturally, and it did in large amounts in the Kingdom of Lydia. Electrum would have been a better material for coins than solid gold because solid gold is really soft. But why did the Lydians become the first people to use coins anyway? Well, the Kingdom of Lydi
a was a big-time hub for transcontinental trade with coastline on the Black, Aegean and Mediterranean seas. Trade from Africa, the Middle East and present-day Europe all passed through Lydia. Before coins were on the scene, raw metal bullion or other goods were bartered for trade. A bartering system is trading different objects, so it’s totally up to whatever a person just *feels* their item is worth. What if people couldn’t agree that their goat should get them a case of wheat or the value of their silk cloth trading for some medicine? By creating coins of uniform value, the Lydians sped up and streamlined transactions. And
one of their main trading partners took notice of the efficiency… the Greeks. They took the idea of coins and ran with it. There were over 2,000 self-governing city states in the Greek world, and over half of them started making their own coins. Some of the coins were made from electrum, like the Lydians, but almost all of them were silver because the Greeks had massive amounts of silver deposits on their territory. All coins of this time period were handmade. The coin designs were carved into dies, and then a blank disc of metal was placed between the dies. The coin maker would then strike the top die with a hammer, creating the coin with impressions on both sides. The Greek coins were renowned for their tight standard of purity and weight, making them very popular and easily incorporated into use all over the w
orld.
The Greeks gold wasn’t limited just to coins shuffling around a marketplace. Gold was also the victorious spoils of war and conquest. Let’s look at Alexander the Great. When you think of Alexander the Great, please don’t use Colin Farrell’s wishy-washy weak portrayal of the Greek king in that awful 2004 movie- that movie got 16% on Rotten Tomatoes and even that is too kind. Alexander the Great was fully a badass; he became king at the ripe old age of 20 after his father was ass
assinated and for the next decade Alexander went a’ conquering and he put together one of the largest empires ever- stretching from Greece to the far edge of India. In 333 B.C. he defeats the Persians- picture the bad guys from the movie “300”, now that extravagance of gold on a movie screen is a little closer to accurate. So- when Alexander defeats Persia, he declares that he wants all the gold in Persia. I repeat… all. The. Gold. In Persia. It takes 20,000 mules and 5,000 camels to haul all the gold back to Greece. And Alexander certainly didn’t stop at Persia, he also conquered Egypt – remember, they have tons of gold as well- and Babylon and India, all places rolling in the goods. Greece is absolutely flush with gold. It’s a huge boost to their coin system and therefore the world. Okay- interesting side note about gold with Mr. Alexander the Great. When he died at the age of 32, his body was laid into a gold sarcophagus and that was then completely filled with honey. The Greeks believed honey would keep his body preserved forever. Then the whole thing was put inside a solid gold casket. He went into death as surrounded in gold as he was in life.
So, Greece has a lot of gold. They didn’t just make coins or lock it up in a bank. Like the ancient Egyptians, the Ancient Greeks associated gold with their gods. They believed their gods wore togas of gold and golden crowns. Gold also features prominently in many Greek myths, like King M
idas and the golden touch, Jason and the golden fleece and the Golden apples of Hesperidin’s. To honor the divine nature of the un-tarnishing yellow metal, the Greeks used gold to make valuable, beautiful objects to be displayed and enjoyed. One artifact was discovered in a most unusual way… in 2016 an elderly British man grabbed a cardboard box of trinkets from under his bed and took it to an appraisal and auction house called Dukes of Dorchester. The man’s grandfather had left him the box of odds and ends, and he wanted to see if there were any items of value. Boy, was there. From inside the beat-up box, the appraiser was astounded to find a 2,300-year-old Greek crown made of 24 karat pure gold. The crown was a floral myrtle wreath design about 8 inches across and weighing in at approximately 100 grams. The Ancient Greeks wore myrtle crowns during religious festivals or for winners of athletic competitions. Was this crown from a high-ranking priest? Maybe it adorned the head of one of the first Olympic winners. Alas, we will never know. The man had no idea where his grandfather had found the gold crown. However, archeologists do have an idea where the crown has been… most likely a tomb… because nestled in the creases of the crown, was ancient dirt.
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One of the things I appreciate about the golden artifacts from Ancient Egypt and the Mediterranean is that for the most part in present-day the artifacts exist intact, safe in museums, or if they are archived- they are high resolution photographed and the images are online and in reference books. Basically, I’m glad we can see them, not just read a few written historical accounts as our only visualization. The Egyptian tomb artifacts do the best job of allowing us a detailed peek into the past- see how people dressed, golden shoes, the jewelry, the headpieces, how they adorned their temples and homes. In our modern world, we don’t DO burial on even a t
enth of the scale of the ancient peoples. Yes, some people do go into their graves wearing perhaps some jewelry, or with a small meaningful physical object, but truly, we practice inheritance now. Passing our gold and silver on into the hands of the living so it can keep being enjoyed and cherished. The side effect is humans no longer create time capsules with their graves; immortalizing the valued objects from one specific point in time. Well- we do, I guess, they’re called museums. Or I guess, your Instagram feed. But in terms of the small precious objects… jewelry… your grandmother’s gold necklace, an aunt’s silver ring, your father’s weddin
g band- the past blends with the present. The jewelry get to live many lives imbued with more and more history and memory as the years go on. I love jewelry for it’s ability to continue to matter- even if a personal owner relinquishes a piece- people scour estate sales, vintage shops, flea markets, eBay, Etsy to find gold and silver pieces. Then the jewelry gets a new keeper and it’s life begins anew.
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Well, that closes out the first episode of our series, “A Casual History of Gold.” I hope you have gotten hooked on thinking about gold and it’s intriguing connection to history. This beautiful, moldable, workable metal that was born in the galaxies above us- that just blows my mind. The thought that my gold wedding band I wear all the time quite possibly came from a star supernova a gajillion light years away will never not be really, really cool haha. The earliest of humans discovered gold just existing in it’s perfect yellow state and so many different cultures instantly attributed a divine nature to the metal. Like, it was too amazing to be anything other than heavenly.
We will see in the next episode how that reverence of gold… and mankind’s insatiable desire to possess it, led to a rapid vast expansion of some cultures… and the utter annihilation of others. I hope you’ll tune in. Check out Tea & Gemstone’s Instagram page to connect and let me know your thoughts on the series so far. The show notes contain a link to our website which has full transcripts of episodes and our bibliography. Our theme song is by Joseph McDade. I am Jen, and it has been a pleasure being your host, and until next time, Stay Sparkly.