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History Fails To Recognize Peridot

Historically many blunders have been made regarding identifying various gemstones. You could ofcourse understand the issue as gemological knowledge was either absent or in it’s infancy during that time. The British plundered nations and exploited it’s people. When doing this in Asia, the royals looted precious gems from nations like India. Some of these gems procured through supression and bloodshed made their way to the British crown. While these gems are even today proudly (shamelessly?) worn by the royals, some of the were wrongly identified. Red spinels and rubelite were sometimes classified as rubies!.

Green beryl is popularly known as emerald, at one time every green gem was classified as an emerald. Cleopatra was a great fan of emeralds, history tells us that. Her jewelry collection included some fascinating emerald gem stone jewels. However as knowledge about gems grew and the science of gemology developed, it was found that many of the so called ‘emeralds’ in her collection were infact peridot. It is widely agreed that this was an honest mistake made by her jeweler. Intentional fraud could ofcourse result in the death sentence in those days.

The www.directstones.com website has more interesting and useful information at http://www.directstones.com/gemstone-library-ly-01.htm If you are interested in the specific story about peridots being mistaken for emeralds, check it out at http://www.directstones.com/emerald-gemstones-ly-01.htm