The History of Diamonds

What is the history of Diamonds?

Prized for millennia and imbued with history and drama, diamonds are so much more than just a ‘Girl’s best friend.’ How much do you know about these beguiling gems?

Diamond Formation

Formed deep within the Earth billions of years ago, a diamond is pure carbon crushed by the power of the Earth into something miraculous. Indeed, many early civilizations saw diamonds as more than just a gem. To the Greeks, they were the splinters of stars; to the Romans, they were tears of the Gods, whilst ancient Hindus saw them as being created by bolts of lighting.

The word ‘Diamond’ comes to us from Latin; ‘Adamans’ meaning ‘the hardest’ (which also gives us the English word ‘Adamant’ meaning unchanging), which became ‘Diamas’ in Medieval Latin before old French gave us ‘Diamant.’ The word ‘Diamond’ first appeared in English in the 14th Century.

Diamond Origin

For almost their entire history, diamonds were found in just one place: the Golconda region of India. Known as Hyderabad today, Golconda was a Sultanate, and the earliest diamonds were found in river banks and deltas.

At first, most diamonds were used for their hardness and to cut other gems as this was a world before diamond cutting, but those rare finds that displayed the typical octahedron shape of an uncut diamond (imagine two pyramids glued at their bases) became valued as jewellery and were exported west from the 10th Century onwards.

A Round and Baguette cut Diamond Line Bracelet

A New Source

India’s monopoly on diamonds ended in 1726 when diamonds were discovered in Brazil, again in alluvial river beds. Initially, Brazilian diamonds were seen as less valuable, and some were exported to India to be re-exported as ‘Genuine Golconda’ diamonds, but the scale and quality of the Brazilian deposits eventually closed down most Indian mines, many of which were close to exhaustion anyway.

Brazilian diamonds dominated until 1866 when a young South African, Erasmus Jacobs, found a transparent rock on his father’s farm. It was the first diamond to be found in South Africa. Over the next few years, more diamonds were found in South Africa than had been discovered over the previous 2000 years in India.