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Smaragdus, Emerald

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SMARAGDUS.
317
Tho Egyptian held the third rank. Pliny notices nothing more of them than their extreme hardness, equal to that of the Scythian : these were extracted from the rocks round about C'optos in the Thebaid. They are not to be confounded with the Ethiopian, found, according to Juba, twenty-five days' journey from Coptos, which were admired for their brilliant green, though not usually clear, nor of the same tint throughout : " acriter virides, sed non facile puri aut concolores."
The two mines last mentioned, the Coptic and the Ethiopian, doubtless furnished their chief supply of the true Emerald to the Romans, as they did even to the Egyptian Caliphs. Exten­sive traces of these workings are still to be discovered under Mount Zubara, first pointed out by M. Caillaud. His report stimulated Mohammed Ali to reopen the shafts : ho had fifty miners employed there when Belzoni visited that region in quest of the ancient Berenice, but their researches had been totally unsuccessful. Belzoni considered that the veins had been quite worked out by the ancients, the vast extent of whose explorations was still attested by the mounds of rubbish covering the ground about the village Sakyat, the former Senskis as existing inscrip­tions prove. Heliodorus also (iEth. ii. 32) speaks of the Emerald mines as lying in the debateable ground between Egypt and Ethiopia : his introduction of the subject into his romance shows that they were still of importance in the 4th century.1 From these Sakyat workings Sir G. Wilkinson brought away several specimens of the gem in its quartz matrix, now exhibited in the mineralogical department of the British Museum. They are indeed of a bad, pale colour, and very foul, yet incontestably true Emeralds.
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