Lapis lazuli carries its history in its name. "Lapis" comes from the Latin word for stone; "lazuli" traces back to the Persian lāzhward, meaning blue. The two travelled together through Old French and medieval Latin before settling into English as lapis lazuli: literally, blue stone.
It is, by a wide margin, the gemstone with the longest continuously worked source on Earth.
Extraction at Sar-i-Sang, in the Badakhshan region, is generally dated to the 7th millennium BCE, and the same mining district remains a primary source of fine material today. In 1271, the explorer Marco Polo documented the mines directly, one of the earliest Western written accounts of where lapis actually came from
Lapis appears in the Standard of Ur, a Mesopotamian artifact from around 2600 BCE, inlaid alongside shell and red limestone. It was carved into scarabs and set into funerary jewelry in ancient Egypt, including pieces recovered from Tutankhamun's tomb around 1323 BCE. Across these early civilizations, lapis moved along some of the earliest long-distance trade routes known to archaeology, prized wherever it arrived.
