The diamond in ancient India - Diamantschleiferei Michael Bonke

the initial stages of diamond polishingit perhaps seems astonishing that the first steps in the diamond polishing craft were taken in thelate middle age, about 1350 A.D. Actually, dating the beginning of the diamond polishing skillback to the 14th century is wrong in any case. In India, diamonds were “polished” much earlierthan that. But then, it did not involve the faceting and shaping of a rough diamond, as we knowit today.In Europe, the attraction of polishing diamonds was born from a desire to discover new gemstones,but this was not the incentive in India. India had an abundance of precious stones. Kashmir hadthe best sapphires, Burma the best rubies and the whole of India was full of precious stonedeposits of all kinds. All these precious stones could be processed and polished into jewels.But there was something different about the diamond. It ranked much above all other preciousstones. To polish it into a jewel would be to degrade it. Moreover, a well-shaped rough diamondoctahedron was of so much more value than any gemstone, that nobody had tried to convert itinto a jewel. In addition to this, it was not as easy to process a diamond as it was to processanother precious stone, since it is the hardest material known to man.The stimulus to process a rough diamond in India arose only and only out of the desire to removeany flaws in an “almost perfect” stone, for instance, if an octahedron has the customary triangularor pentagonal relief figures on one or several of its eight facets.perfect octahedron octahedron with triangular reliefmarkson the surfaceThe ancient Indian scripture Ratnapriksa from the 5th century says:“the diamond flawed with even extremely small, barely perceptible damages is only worth onetenthof the value or even less. The diamond, large or small, which has several noticeable flawsis not even worth a hundredth of the value.”