40 Fun Facts About Lapis Lazuli

Which country's Sar-i Sang mines have supplied the world's finest lapis lazuli for more than 6,000 years?

Afghanistan's remote Badakhshan mines fed lapis lazuli to ancient Egypt, China and Rome, carried out of the mountains along caravan routes.

Which Egyptian pharaoh's gold funeral mask has eyebrows and eye surrounds inlaid with lapis lazuli?

Tutankhamun's mask weighs over 10 kilograms, and its makers set quartz eyes with obsidian pupils inside the lapis lazuli outlines.

Which prized blue pigment did Renaissance painters make by grinding lapis lazuli into powder?

Ultramarine means 'beyond the sea': Italian traders imported the rock from distant Asian mines, and the paint was at times valued as highly as gold.

Which Vermeer masterpiece, whose sitter wears a blue and yellow turban, was painted with lapis lazuli pigment?

Girl with a Pearl Earring, painted around 1665, hangs in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, where it was long known as Girl with a Turban.

Which mineral forms the glittering metallic-yellow flecks that sparkle across polished lapis lazuli?

Pyrite, better known as fool's gold, is welcome in small doses: a light, even scatter of flecks is a mark of top-quality lapis lazuli.

In Minecraft, players spend lapis lazuli along with experience levels at which block to power up gear?

Enchanting table upgrades come in three tiers costing one, two or three pieces of lapis lazuli, so the strongest choice always takes three.

In which Cartoon Network series is Lapis Lazuli a blue Gem freed after millennia trapped in a mirror?

Steven Universe gave Lapis Lazuli control over water, and she can sprout watery wings from the gemstone set in her back.

Which English colour word, the heraldic term for blue, comes from the same root as lapis lazuli's name?

Azure reached English through Old French azur from Arabic lazaward, the gem's name; its opening l was dropped, mistaken for the French article.

Scientists found lapis lazuli pigment preserved in which part of a medieval nun's remains?

Dental tartar trapped the blue specks, perhaps because she licked her brush to a point while painting manuscripts.

Which gemstone named in older Bible translations do most scholars believe was really lapis lazuli?

Sapphire was unknown before the Roman Empire, so the blue pavement beneath God's feet in the Book of Exodus was most likely lapis lazuli.

Renaissance painters usually reserved costly lapis lazuli blue for the robes of which religious figure?

The Virgin Mary's robes took the costliest blue to signal purity, holiness and status, so the central figure got first call on the paint.

Which South American country, which mines lapis lazuli near Ovalle in the Andes, made the gem its national stone?

Chile chose lapis lazuli in 1984, then added a second national stone, the locally quarried combarbalite, nine years later.

Russia's lapis lazuli comes from deposits just west of which lake?

Lake Baikal lapis lazuli faced the doors, stoves and panels of the Lyons Room in the Catherine Palace near Saint Petersburg.

Which Mughal mausoleum is decorated with lapis lazuli, jade, turquoise and carnelian imported from across Asia?

Taj Mahal builders brought jade and crystal from China and turquoise from Tibet for the tomb Shah Jahan raised to his wife Mumtaz Mahal.

In Dragon Ball, Lapis and Lazuli are the original human names of which pair of fighters?

Androids 17 and 18 are twins turned into cyborgs by Dr. Gero, and creator Akira Toriyama only revealed their birth names in 2014.

Which Irish poet wrote 'Lapis Lazuli', inspired by a Chinese carving of three men, a bird and an instrument?

W. B. Yeats treated the carved figures as a reminder that gaiety can survive in the face of tragedy.

Which ancient poem, often called the oldest surviving work of narrative literature, mentions lapis lazuli several times?

Epic of Gilgamesh grew out of Sumerian poems about a king of Uruk, and its earliest surviving tablets date to around 1800 BC.

Ancient Egyptians often carved lapis lazuli amulets in the shape of which sacred insect?

Scarab amulets were tied to the god Khepri and became enormously popular in Egypt from about 2000 BC.

Which pre-Columbian empire carved jewellery and artefacts from lapis lazuli mined high in the Andes?

Inca craftsmen worked Andean deposits that are still mined, which makes South America a major source of the gem outside Asia.

Because lapis lazuli is a blend of several minerals, geologists class it as which type of rock?

Metamorphic rocks are remade by heat and pressure, and lapis lazuli forms where intruding molten rock bakes limestone.

Which blue mineral, named much like the rock itself, is traditionally listed as lapis lazuli's main ingredient?

Lazurite is the blue mineral painters were after when they ground the gem for its colour; lazulite, despite the name, is an unrelated phosphate.

Which white mineral forms the pale streaks and patches that buyers least want to see in lapis lazuli?

Calcite is so unwelcome that much of the lapis lazuli on the market has been treated with blue dye to hide it.

Which element, locked inside the crystals as charged clusters of three atoms, gives lapis lazuli its blue colour?

Sulfur clusters called trisulfur radicals soak up orange light and leave a deep blue, so the colour owes nothing to copper or cobalt.

Lapis lazuli rates only about 5, too soft for hard-wearing rings, on which scale of mineral hardness?

Mohs scale rankings top out with diamond at 10, and the German geologist Friedrich Mohs introduced them in 1812.

Which medieval traveller, who set out for China in 1271, wrote of the fine lapis lazuli mined in Badakhshan?

Marco Polo's book praises the region's azure stone; few outsiders have reached the remote mines, where supplies still arrive by mule train.

Which Renaissance master left The Entombment unfinished, with gaps where costly lapis lazuli blue was still needed?

Michelangelo abandoned the panel when he left Rome for Florence in 1501, and it now hangs, still unfinished, in London's National Gallery.

Which museum displays the Statue of Ebih-Il from ancient Mari, its staring eyes inlaid with lapis lazuli?

The Louvre statue shows a praying official of Mari, a city-state in modern Syria, and was carved about 4,400 years ago.

Sumerian royal lyres found in the 1920s carry the golden head of which animal, bearded in lapis lazuli?

Bull heads wrapped in gold foil crown the finest lyres, with hair, beard and eyes of lapis lazuli; the best is in Baghdad's Iraq Museum.

From which language's word lazhward, thought to be a local place name, does the 'lazuli' in lapis lazuli come?

Persian lazhward passed into Arabic and then Medieval Latin as lazulum, so lapis lazuli simply means 'stone of lazulum'.

Which royal-blue mineral, found in vast deposits in Ontario in 1891, is a common stand-in for lapis lazuli?

Sodalite gives itself away by what it lacks: it rarely carries the glittering metallic flecks that pepper genuine lapis lazuli.

Lapis lazuli usually forms inside which crystalline rock, a stone long prized by sculptors and builders?

Marble and the gem share a birth: heat from intruding molten rock recrystallises limestone and grows the blue crystals inside it.

Which British archaeologist unearthed the lapis lazuli jewellery of Queen Puabi in her Sumerian tomb?

Leonard Woolley at first misread the queen's name as Shubad, and his wife Katharine drew the detailed diagrams of the dig.

Which Venetian painter filled half of Bacchus and Ariadne with a sky of costly lapis lazuli blue?

Titian split the canvas diagonally, giving one triangle to the still blue sky and the other to a riot of green and brown revellers.

Which Roman writer described lapis lazuli as opaque and sprinkled with specks of gold?

Pliny the Elder set the description down in his vast Natural History, published shortly before he died in the eruption of Vesuvius.

Which Bronze Age civilisation founded the trading colony of Shortugai close to the lapis lazuli mines?

Indus Valley traders set up Shortugai around 2000 BC on the Oxus river, where diggers later found blue beads beside Harappan pottery.

Which French chemist won a national prize in 1828 for a cheap artificial version of lapis lazuli pigment?

Jean-Baptiste Guimet later quit his government post to manufacture the colour at his own factory in Fleurieu-sur-Saône.

Which figure of Mahayana Buddhism bears a formal name meaning 'King of Lapis Lazuli Light'?

Medicine Buddha, the Buddha of healing, is said to rule an eastern pure land whose name means Pure Lapis Lazuli.

America's first official birthstone list in 1912 paired lapis lazuli with turquoise for which month?

December lost lapis lazuli in 1952, when American jewellers updated the list and put zircon in its place.

Which Sumerian treasure in the British Museum shows scenes of war and peace in shell, red limestone and lapis lazuli?

Standard of Ur mosaics once covered a hollow wooden box, found in a royal tomb beside a man who may have been its bearer.

Which Sumerian goddess carried a lapis lazuli measuring rod on her mythical descent into the underworld?

Inanna had to surrender the rod, her headdress, her jewels and finally her robe, one item at each of seven gates on the way down.