Legend says that the first diamond found in India was found by a shepherd who sold the stone for a small amount of millet.
The western European context for ‘diamond; is derived from the Late Latin adamas and the earlier Greek translated as adamao, which means ’the untamable’.
Diamonds were used to decorate religious objects, serve as a talisman against evil and a protector in battle. Diamonds are also found in the culture and mysticism of Hinduism, Jainism and Tibetan Lamaism. Diamonds were traded out of India by both sea and land routes. Classical stories of sources in Ethiopia and the legend of the Valley of the Diamonds may have originated because to mask the ultimate source of diamonds, India.
The early trading capital was Venice, where polishing a diamond’s facets begin in the 1330s. By the late 14th century the art of diamond polishing had spread to Bruges and Paris and later, in the 15th century, Antwerp became the flourishing diamond center. Beginning early in the 15th century, European exploration for trade routes to the East brought a major revolution on the availability of diamonds in the West.
In 1622, an Englishman named Metgold visited the Golconda region where Golconda was only a market place where dealers came to buy and sell diamonds. He described a miners’ settlement of about 30,000 people.
Many diamonds were found in this region from medieval time to the nineteenth century that ended up in the royal treasuries of sultans and shahs in India and Persia.
In 1867 the first diamonds outside India were discovered in South Africa somewhere in the vicinity of the Orange River and traded in Hopetown in the northern Cape, 600 miles from Cape Town.
Brief history of diamond
