Gemstones Paved the Way

How a garnet necklace helps map trade in the ancient world

Figure 1.  Gold, garnet, and agate necklace and earrings. Greek, 1st century BCE. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, there is a necklace made of gold, garnet, and agate (Figure 1). It is from ancient Greece and dated to the first century BCE. For much of the twentieth century, scholars assumed that the deep red garnets used in Hellenistic jewelry like this necklace and the one depicted in Figure 2 came from deposits around the Mediterranean. More recent analyses have unsettled that assumption.

Figure 2. Gold, emerald, carnelian, banded onyx, and garnet necklace (detail: bezel setting and wire work). Roman, 1st century CE. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Rethinking the Origins of Hellenistic Garnet

The trade routes that brought Indian garnets westward were not new in the Hellenistic period, but Alexander the Great's military campaigns across Persia, Afghanistan, and into the Indus Valley in the 330s BCE tore open routes to Greek merchants on a scale previously impossible (Nikopoulou et al. 2025). Within a generation of Alexander's death, Alexandria had become a city where Indian pepper, Arabian frankincense, and Sri Lankan gems moved through the same harbor en route to locations throughout the Mediterranean. In consequence, many gemstones traveled roughly five thousand kilometers before they were set in gold and worn on a neck in Alexandria or Athens.

Figure 3. Map of ports and trade routes described in The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, an early 1st-century Greek navigational guide. The map depicts Egyptian ports through the Red Sea to the western coast of India. This map, based on literary and archaeological evidence, reconstructs the commercial network linking the Mediterranean, Arabia, and India across the wider Erythraean Sea.

From Raw Material to Refined Forms

The jewelry in Figures 1, 2, & 5 is therefore evidence of the longevity of trade routes established at the beginning of the Hellenistic period circa 323 BCE.  The variety of the stones used, meanwhile, shows the integration of new raw materials at work in Greek jewelry forms and their continued use in Roman jewelry items. Gemstones such as garnet likely arrived in their natural forms and had to be cut and shaped by Greek goldsmiths and jewelry craftsmen (Figure 4).

As a non-native material, techniques of cutting and setting garnet evolved in response to what the stones required. The stones were set carefully, in ways that account for their particular hardness, color, and luster. We can also imagine that the craftsmen who made them were working within a tradition that had been adapting to imported materials for generations.

Figure 4 Almandine garnet (raw specimen) of the variety most commonly identified in Hellenistic jewelry. Specimens from the Garibpet deposit, Telangana, India, have been traced to Mediterranean collections through spectroscopic analysis.

Ancient Sources on Gemstone Trade

Ancient writers from the Roman Imperial period recorded some sources for foreign gemstones and their trade routes. In Book 37, Chapter 25, of his Natural History, Pliny the Elder compares garnets (which he calls carbunculi) from a variety of places based on the combined assessments of authors before him, noting eastern origins for many varieties. He says there are two kinds of “carbunculi,” Indian and Garamantic, or “Carthaginian,” on account of their association with the wealth of Carthage (propter opulentiam Carthaginis Magnae).

Figure 5. Gold necklace with garnet pendant and glass bead. Greek, 3rd century BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

A text written around the first century CE offers the possible routes through which such stones were likely transported. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea is a Greek merchant's guide to trade in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean (Figure 3). As a periplus, the text lists the ports and commodities that moved along trade routes in practical detail — including gems moving westward in exchange for Mediterranean wine and metals (Casson 1989).

Gemstone Trade in Late Antiquity

The transport of gemstones from regions east of the Levant continued into Late Antiquity. Studies using Raman spectroscopy and X-ray fluorescence on garnets from museum collections across Greece in the Byzantine Period have traced a significant portion of them to a single source: the Garibpet deposit in what is now Telangana State, in southern India (Schmetzer, K. et al. 2018).

The Human Story Behind Objects of Luxury

As the necklace from Figure 1 sits in its case in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, it catches the light the way it always has. But the stone has a biography that the label does not record: the hands that extracted from the earth, possibly in southern India; the people who helped transport it with other raw materials and commodities by sea or overland; the skilled jeweler who cut and set the stone, then transmitted it to its final owner, with whom it was likely buried. Its journey and transformation involved countless people whose names we will never know. Centuries passed before it emerged through excavations to greet modernity in its display case in New York City, thousands of miles from its site of origin.

Such an object biography is not unique to this necklace. It is, in varying forms, the biography of most of the precious stones in ancient jewelry. The objects we study as evidence of Greek or Roman culture were made possible by a world that extended far beyond Greece or Rome — a world whose boundaries were set by how far a ship could sail and how reliably a stone could be mined, transported, and valued at the other end of the journey.

The ancient garnet thus records its historical routes.

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References

Casson, Lionel, trans. The Periplus Maris Erythraei. Princeton University Press, 1989.

Nikopoulou, M. et al. “Study of Garnets in Hellenistic-Roman Jewellery from the Collections of the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki.” Journal of Raman Spectroscopy, 2025, Vol 56, Issue 11, p1235.

Pliny the Elder. Natural History, Book XXXVII. Translated by D.E. Eichholz. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (Loeb Classical Library), 1962.

Schmetzer, K. et al. “An Early Byzantine Engraved Almandine from the Garibpet Deposit, Telangana State, India.” Gems & Gemology, Summer 2018. Gemological Institute of America.

Further Reading & Resources

The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gold, garnet, and agate necklace and earrings. Greek, 1st century BCE. Accession no. 256194. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/256194

Ogden, Jack. Ancient Jewellery. London: British Museum Press, 1992.