Persian Cornelian Seal, an antique from the late 1800s, most finely hand-incised. Originally these beautifully crafted seals were attached, usually, to a small wood handle for ease of use in the stamping of personalized seals on wax freshly melted onto the closing flap of a document. In the 1990s in the Afghan Bazaar in Peshawar, a warren of Afghan and Turkoman traders displaced from Kabul by the strife in Afghanistan, lovely old Persian Cornelian seals such as the above were relatively easy to obtain, usually still attached to their wood handles, but have now become rare.
The Cornelian used in these old seals was always of the finest quality of this gemstone, a gemstone loved and appreciated since ancient, ancient times, for its beauty, its warmth of colour, and its durability, for though it can be handcarved with the sort of intricacy shown in the above example, it is tough.
The source of the Cornelian used in these old Persian seals was the ancient mineral mines region of Gujerat, West India, source of the finest quality of this gemstone since antiquity.
(It is interesting to note that also in the late 1800s certain tribal groupings in Nagaland, far eastern India, two thousand ks from Gujerat, simultaneously developed a taste for the finest quality Gujerati Cornelian, brought all the way across India for them, by Indian traders, in the form of the barrel-shaped beads that are now almost impossible to source.)