the.com/lapis lazuli
a rock so blue that Renaissance painters guarded it like gold and reserved it for the Virgin Mary
means A deep-blue semiprecious stone, prized since antiquity for ornament and as the source of the pigment ultramarine.
from A two-part name: Latin 'lapis' simply means 'stone,' while 'lazuli' traces back through Medieval Latin 'lazulum' to Persian 'lāžward,' the name for the stone and the region (in present-day Afghanistan) where the finest deposits were mined. That same Persian root, by the way, is the ancestor of our word 'azure' — so 'lapis lazuli' is, fittingly, the 'stone of blue.'
- price
- once cost more per ounce than gold
- source
- mostly mined from one Afghan valley for 6,000 years
- pigment
- ground into ultramarine, the most coveted blue
- tutankhamun
- inlaid into the pharaoh's iconic gold mask
- composition
- a rock, not a mineral, flecked with golden pyrite
for instance
afghan national museum — houses historic lapis lazuli artifacts and specimens from badakhshan province