Visit Egypt. Do the Nile. Ride a camel in the shadow of the pyramids. This is a civilization that flourished for 3,000 years. We in the 21st century are baffled by ancient Egypt. Not a dozen things, not 100, we have 1,000’s of unanswered questions. Egypt marched through human history doing things, making things, building things that just scream exquisite, that holler the impossible. There are guys that conduct tours of ancient Egypt that show one thing after another that our contemporary engineers say we have no technology, no equipment that could duplicate what they did. The engineers stand, they shake their heads in disbelief, admiring what was done while acknowledging the endless evidence of the impossible.
We stand in awe of the Egyptian civilization. Take the scarab, a beetle of the desert. It was high-fashion for over 2,000 years. The Egyptians carved them from stone, made them in ceramic, painted and enameled them, carved mystic hieroglyphs on the flat back. The scarab was a must-have for pharaohs and commoners. Our fashions last a year, long fashion runs might be 10 years. The Egyptians went 1,000’s of years with popular ideas.
Here is what I wish I could do, go back to 500 BC and sit down with a pharaoh and show them this piece of jewelry. The scarab is an apple green Maine tourmaline weighing 23.76 carats carved by Gerhard Becker of Germany. The apple green material is unusually clear. We made one somewhat similar and showed it in an email several months ago, sold it within a day. This new necklace has a bigger apple green gem, 4 bright blue sapphires, and 28 natural earth-mined diamonds. We’ve added the diamonds to this newest version.
Going back to my meeting with the pharaoh, I’d want to know how they were doing such magnificent things. I’d also want to see his reaction to this piece. From the future, 2,500 years later when we have mastered gem cutting and can offer the drama of color and precision. I’m sure he would be impressed that someone from the far future would know about their scarab customs. It could be a really interesting conversation. If the conversation waned, I’d whip out my iPhone and show him the 100,000 photos my phone holds.
I bought 11 scarabs 45 years ago from one of the gem miners of the 1972 Maine tourmaline discovery. We have 6 scarabs left. When my shop foreman brought this one down for me to take a look he said, “You’re really going to like this one”. I tried to prepare myself and was ready to be nonchalant. He showed the necklaces to me and I lost my composure. I couldn’t stop saying, “Wow”.
Who should own this? Someone who has deep respect for anything ancient Egypt. Yes, the pharaohs would rave. The pharaohs would babble with excitement about the beauty. For you today, this is a piece that when you wear it to a gathering, everyone will notice. No one will ever forget. The mounting was handmade. It’s 14 karat yellow gold.
When our jewelry shop in New York City made this we didn’t ask, but they hand-pierced a pattern on the back. All of our scarabs in this collection have patterns engraved on the back. I suspect, but I’m not sure, that the pattern they engraved and pierced was the same pattern on the stone. The patterns on the scarabs may say something in ancient Egyptian but because I don’t read the language, it’s a mystery.
This is an awesome piece of jewelry. If you have a pathway back to ancient Egypt or have mastered time travel you could have a lot of fun with this new necklace.
Apple Green Maine Tourmaline
They found the motherlode of gem tourmaline in 1972 on Plumbago Mountain in Newry, Maine, 75 miles north of our store. They found a breathtaking two metric tons of gems. They found pink, green, blue, teal, and watermelon tourmaline. One special group they had cut in Germany were 11 scarabs, we bought them all. Many of the tourmaline were apple green in color. They found so much it’s now over a half-century later and they are still cutting gems. Yes, mostly small stones from this historic gem find.
We kept in close touch with the head of the Plumbago mining company and the company’s lead gem cutter, and asked him every year about how the crystals were holding out and what they would most likely run out of first. In the early 90’s Phil began saying his big apple green colors would run out by the mid 1990’s. He was accurate with his prediction. Big apple greens vanished 30 years ago. Except we had acquired this collection of big apple green scarabs. We bought them and put them in the back of one of our safes and kind of forgot about them.
In the last 10 years we’ve started to make jewelry using these big gems. Their size and beauty of cutting makes them by themselves truly rare collector’s items. Now with some of the exotic things we are doing in design, these are becoming some of our most extraordinary creations.
This was the original collection of scarab Maine tourmaline, 11 stones. We have been making them into jewelry. We have only 6 left.
