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EMERALD.
207
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Coptos, a city of the Thebai'd. Other kinds are found in copper mines."
After
all that has been said, it appears to me that we should not hold as
truth the statements of many old authors, and among them Tavernier, who
assert that the ancients had no knowledge of the emerald, and that it
was first brought by the Spaniards from Ameiica to Asia and Europe, in
times not very remote from ours. The Greeks and Romans then had their
precious emeralds from India, Bactriana and Egypt.
In
Upper Egypt there is a chain of mountains, not far from the city of
Asna, where there are some places still called the mines of emerald. By
order of the Viceroy, the French traveller Caillond explored those
places and found there some old mines ; there were houses and tools
abandoned, in all probability, in the second century A.D. Wilkinson
afterwards discovered extensive caverns, also, on Mount Zahara, and
there picked up emeralds similar to the ancient Greek and Roman gems,
that is, inferior to those from America and India.
The emerald continued to be used in precious ornaments even in the darkest times of barbarism.
The
iron crown which Theolinda gave in the sixth century to the cathedral
of Monza had many emeralds mixed with its rubies and sapphires. There
were some in the crown of Agilulfo, restored by the celebiated
Anguillotto Braccioforte in the fourteenth century, and therefore many
years before the birth of Columbus.
There were emeralds in the cross of Lothairius, a
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