How it began
Sar-i Sang, whose name means 'place of stones', is a mining village in the Kokcha valley of Badakhshan, in the Hindu Kush of northeastern Afghanistan. Lapis lazuli occurs there in a thick band of marble high on a steep mountainside. Nobody knows when the stone was first found. Archaeologists suppose that bright blue pieces fell into the valley and river, where they were easy to see.
The starting date is stated differently by different sources. Lapis from the region reached Tepe Gawra in northern Iraq by the late 5th millennium BCE, and the British Museum says it has been mined in Afghanistan for over 6,500 years. The IUGS geoheritage listing gives a longer span of about 10,000 years.
How it works
In antiquity there was a single mine, a series of tall caverns joined by narrow passages, more than 330 meters up the mountain. Soot on its walls and roof, in places 45 meters high, records the old method, which Lieutenant Wood described in 1838. Miners carried fuel and water up the slope, lit a fire against the rock face, then threw cold water on the heated stone to crack it. Pick, hammer and chisel freed the lapis from its marble matrix.
The rock itself is an aggregate. Its blue comes from the mineral lazurite, usually with calcite and flecks of pyrite. It forms lens-shaped bodies and layers up to 6 meters thick in the marble.
How it spread
The stone traveled very far very early. By the mid-3rd millennium BCE it was moved in bulk to southern Iraq, where the Royal Cemetery at Ur held lapis jewelry, seals, inlay on the Standard of Ur and dagger handles. It also reached Egypt. Shahr-i Sokhta in Iran was a working and trading hub on the way west, and kilos of raw stone were found at Ebla in Syria. Later the Medes supplied the Assyrian empire, and the Achaemenid Persians controlled the whole route. Venetian traders brought the stone to Renaissance Italy.
For a long time the Afghan origin of ancient lapis was assumed rather than proven. Non-invasive trace-element analysis by a team in Turin has since matched beads from Ur, Egyptian amulets and Medici carvings to the Badakhshan source.
What lasted
Lapis from Badakhshan became one of the most valued materials of the ancient world, used for jewelry, amulets and royal objects across Mesopotamia and Egypt, including inlays in the funerary mask of Tutankhamun. In Renaissance Italy the stone was ground and purified to make ultramarine, a deep blue that was among the costliest painting materials. The long trade also made the deposit a reference point for archaeology, since tracing the stone reveals exchange networks over thousands of years.
Where it stands today
Mining continues. The old mine, Mardan-y Yak, is closed, and newer mines follow the veins along the top of the mountain. Apart from dynamite and drills, the method has changed little. A gemologist who visited in 1994 described cramped tunnels with no ventilation, no hard hats, and miners carrying up to 60 kilograms of stone down the mountain on their backs. During the Afghan-Soviet war the Mujahideen mined gems to help finance their campaign. The deposit is now listed as an IUGS geoheritage site.
