Lapis Lazuli Through Time: The Blue Stone That Crossed the Ancient World

By Inna Zlotnik

Around 2500 BCE, a woman named Puabi was buried in the ancient city of Ur.

She was a queen. Among the objects found near her right arm were cylinder seals made of lapis lazuli.

One shows a banquet, with women seated opposite one another, holding cups. Another preserves her name and title:

Puabi. Queen.

No husband’s name. No father’s name. Only her own name and title.

Four and a half thousand years later, a small blue stone still carries her name.

But there is no lapis lazuli anywhere near Ur.

Where the Blue Begins

Puabi’s stone had travelled thousands of kilometres.

Its source lay in the mountains of Badakhshan, in what is now northeastern Afghanistan. Lapis lazuli is still mined in those same mountains today.

At the Royal Cemetery of Ur, archaeologists even found an unworked piece of lapis lazuli, dating to around 2600 BCE. It had not yet become a bead, a seal, or an amulet.

It simply lay there, thousands of kilometres from the mountains where it had been mined.

We do not know the names of the people who carried it across mountains and plains, who bought it, sold it and passed it from hand to hand.

But by the third millennium BCE, lapis lazuli was already travelling enormous distances.

At Ur, it became jewelry and seals.

And it was here that lapis also became connected with writing and knowledge.

Names on Blue Stone

About two centuries after Puabi, another extraordinary woman lived at Ur: Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon of Akkad and high priestess of the moon god Nanna.

Today she is regarded as one of the earliest known authors whose name has survived.

Several Sumerian hymns are attributed to her. They survive in later copies, so scholars continue to debate how much of the texts as we know them can be traced directly to Enheduanna herself.

But in one of these works, something unexpectedly personal happens.

A woman speaks about being driven from her temple and stripped of her position, about fear, humiliation and loneliness. She turns to the goddess Inanna for help and later tells of her return.

And among words written more than four thousand years ago, she names herself:

“I, Enheduanna.”

We cannot know exactly how closely the surviving text preserves her own words. But behind the title, a person suddenly appears, a woman speaking about what happened to her.

And her name survived not only in literary tradition.

Excavations at Ur uncovered fragments of a lapis lazuli cylinder seal belonging to her courtier Ilum-palil. Its inscription names the woman he served:

“Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon.”

Four thousand years later, her name has reached us twice: in a text and on lapis lazuli.

In the same Sumerian culture of writing, lapis appears in another image.

Nisaba’s Lapis Lazuli Tablet

Nisaba was a goddess closely connected with writing, scribes and knowledge.

In an ancient hymn she is described as a divine scribe and keeper of records. She is connected with measurement, calculation and writing, with everything that needed to be recorded and preserved.

And in her hands is a lapis lazuli tablet.

The hymn describes her holding it on her knees and consulting the sacred tablet of the heavenly stars.

This does not mean that the Sumerians called lapis a “stone of wisdom” or gave it the meanings we give it today.

But the image has survived for thousands of years:

the goddess of writing and knowledge reading a lapis lazuli tablet.

The Blue of Egypt

Today, the sight of deep blue beside gold almost instantly brings Ancient Egypt to mind.

And there is a reason for that.

One of the most recognizable examples is the treasure of Tutankhamun, where brilliant gold appears beside intense blue. Genuine lapis lazuli was used in his jewelry alongside gold, carnelian, quartz, faience and glass.

But the famous blue and gold beauty is only what we see today.

For the ancient Egyptians, lapis lazuli meant much more.

Egypt had no lapis lazuli deposits of its own. The stone came from far away and for thousands of years was used in jewelry, scarabs, figures of deities and amulets.

One of its most powerful stories is connected with the heart.

For the Egyptians, the heart was more than an organ. It was the seat of thought, memory, emotion and a person’s moral being.

For this reason, during mummification the heart was usually left inside the body. It was needed after death because there was still a judgment ahead.

The heart of the deceased would be weighed against Ma’at, the principle of truth and right order.

But the heart knew everything. And it could become a witness against its own owner.

One of the famous spells of the Book of the Dead asks the heart not to testify against the deceased at judgment.

Special heart-shaped amulets were also placed with the dead. Some were made of lapis lazuli.

These tiny blue hearts have survived.

One, found at Thebes and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, dates to approximately 1080 to 945 BCE.

It is only one centimetre high.

A tiny blue heart, almost three thousand years old.

When Stone Became Color

In time, lapis lazuli acquired another life.

The stone was crushed, ground and carefully processed until the intense blue mineral could be separated from the other components of the rock.

Stone became color.

Lapis lazuli became natural ultramarine.

And its journey still began in Afghanistan.

The stone that had once crossed the ancient world as beads, seals and amulets now travelled west as blue pigment.

In medieval Europe, natural ultramarine was rare and extraordinarily expensive. It was used to illuminate precious manuscripts.

And tiny particles of that blue preserved the trace of a woman whose name history had lost.

Woman B78

At a medieval religious community in Dalheim, Germany, a woman aged approximately 45 to 60 was buried sometime between the late tenth and twelfth centuries.

We do not know her name.

To archaeologists, she became simply B78.

Almost a thousand years later, researchers discovered microscopic particles of brilliant blue pigment trapped in the calculus on her teeth.

It was ultramarine made from lapis lazuli.

In medieval Europe, a pigment this precious was used in costly illuminated manuscripts.

Researchers considered several possible explanations, but concluded that the most plausible was that the woman herself had worked on manuscripts. Perhaps while painting she occasionally touched the brush to her lips to shape its fine point, allowing tiny particles of pigment to enter her mouth.

Her name disappeared.

Her books did not survive.

The lapis lazuli on her teeth did.

Vermeer’s Blue

Natural ultramarine was so expensive that artists generally saved it for places where a rich blue actually needed to be seen.

Vermeer did something different.

He used ultramarine not only for blue fabrics, but in shadows and beneath other colors, even in places where the viewer could not see blue at all.

In Girl with a Pearl Earring, ultramarine is hidden even in the shadows of her yellow jacket.

It was an expensive devotion for a painter who produced only a small number of paintings and left his family in debt after his death.

Who was paying for all that ultramarine?

We do not know for certain.

Part of the answer may have been Pieter van Ruijven, a wealthy Delft collector and one of Vermeer’s most important buyers. In 1657, he lent the artist 200 guilders, and many of Vermeer’s paintings later ended up in the family collection.

Scholars have suggested that Van Ruijven may have been more than an ordinary customer, although there is no evidence that he specifically paid for Vermeer’s expensive pigments.

But wherever the money came from, the choice was Vermeer’s.

Even where no one was supposed to see the blue, Vermeer still chose ultramarine.

What Lapis Lazuli Means Today

Today, lapis lazuli is once again more likely to be held in the hand as a stone than used as a pigment.

For many people today, lapis is a stone of wisdom, knowledge, clear thinking, intuition and truth. It is also connected with finding the right words and expressing yourself clearly.

Often called a stone of learning, lapis is especially recommended for students, people who study intensively, work with large amounts of information or are preparing for exams. It is believed to help with concentration, memory and clear thinking.

These are beliefs about the stone, not scientifically proven effects. And we cannot say that today’s ideas about lapis came directly from ancient Mesopotamia.

But four thousand years later, the story finds an unexpected rhyme.

Long ago, names were carved into lapis. Seals were made from it. Nisaba, goddess of scribes and knowledge, was imagined with a lapis lazuli tablet on her knees.

The stone travelled through kingdoms, tombs, manuscripts and painters’ workshops. It carried Puabi’s name, became a tiny Egyptian heart, left its blue trace on a medieval woman’s teeth and disappeared into the shadows of a Vermeer painting.

And through all those centuries, its journey continued to begin in the same mountains. Lapis lazuli is still mined in Badakhshan today.

And thousands of years later, a student still puts a small piece of lapis in their pocket before an exam.

The story of this blue stone is not over.

Sources & Further Reading

Penn Museum — Queen Puabi Cylinder Seal
British Museum — Lapis Lazuli from the Royal Cemetery at Ur
The Morgan Library & Museum — Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia
British Museum — Cylinder Seal Naming Enheduanna
Oxford ETCSL — Hymn to Nisaba
The Metropolitan Museum of Art — Lapis Lazuli Heart Amulet
British Museum — The Weighing of the Heart
Science Advances — Medieval Woman B78 and Ultramarine
Mauritshuis — Vermeer and Ultramarine
GIA — Lapis Lazuli History and Lore