Handcut Turquoise, with Carnelian and 20ct Gold spacer beads, in a necklace created, strung in Sydney.
The fine blue gemstones in the above Handcut Turquoise strand have two sources: the smaller 5mm round beads are from China, from one of the dozen or more working Turquoise mines in that land; the longer tubular Turquoise is from the fabled Khorasan plateau that takes in the border regions of North-West Afghanistan, North-East Iran, along with a number of the “-stan” republics, the area that supplied the Ancient World, of Egypt and of Rome, with this fabulous gemstone.
All the above Turquoise beads are recently cut, certainly within the last five years.
The three superfine Carnelian gemstone beads around the centre of the necklace are old, from the ancient Carnelian mines of Gujerat on the west coast of India, source of the finest quality of this gemstone over millennia. The rough for these beads was mined around 1900, give or take a decade or two, and hand-cut there in Gujerat in the traditional barrel cut, specifically for merchants in the business of trade with certain tribes of Nagaland, all the way across India, to its north-east corner bordering Burma, where these Naga tribes valued Carnelian of this cut and high quality as items of high prestige.
Interestingly, old Naga Carnelians are now seriously rare and fetch a higher price per gram than the finest old gem-quality Coral.