Lapis Lazuli

The Road Out of Badhakshan

Nearly all of the world’s finest lapis lazuli can be traced back to one remote region of Afghanistan. For thousands of years, the stone traveled from the mountains of Badakhshan across the ancient world, tracing routes of trade and exchange that began long before the Silk Roads.

Gold could be found across much of the ancient world. Pearls came from several seas, amber from the Baltic and North Sea coasts, and carnelian from deposits stretching from India to Arabia and beyond. But lapis was different. Nearly all of the world’s finest lapis lazuli can be traced back to Kokcha Valley in Afghanistan’s Badakhshan Province.

The Mines of Badakhshan

The most important lapis deposits lie at Sar-e Sang, high in the Hindu Kush. Lapis is a rock rather than a single mineral: its color comes principally from lazurite, while calcite can appear as white veining and pyrite as the characteristic flecks of gold.

The old workings at Sar-e Sang sit hundreds of metres above the Kokcha Valley, accessible only by steep mountain paths. Tools, fuel and water all had to be carried up by hand. Inside the mountain, miners used fire-setting to break the hard rock, building fires against the quarry face before working the fractured stone with picks, hammers and chisels. Over generations of mining, enormous chambers were opened inside the mountain, their walls blackened with soot from the fires used to reach the blue seams within the marble. Mining methods changed, eventually introducing explosives, but the difficulty imposed by the landscape remained.

The First Lapis Routes

Once extracted, the stone began another journey. Lapis from the mountains of Central Asia was moving beyond its source by the Neolithic period, and during the Bronze Age it travelled through networks extending west across Afghanistan and the Iranian plateau toward Mesopotamia, while other routes extended east, connecting the region with the Indus Valley. These exchanges were taking place thousands of years before the routes we now call the Silk Roads had taken shape.

Lapis often left Badakhshan as rough stone, to be cut and finished at different centres along its journey. One of the clearest examples is Shahr-i Sokhta in present-day eastern Iran, where lapis was worked between roughly 3200 and 2300 BC. Archaeologists have found large quantities of semi-processed stone, flakes, unfinished and broken beads and other working debris, but comparatively few finished lapis objects, evidence that the site functioned as a cutting and processing centre. The stone was therefore not simply traded from source to destination: it moved through a network of workshops where it was progressively transformed before continuing onward.

Iran Mesopotamia during the third millennium B.C. The distribution of the sites shows the comparative position of lapis lazuli producing, trading, and marketing centers.

From Ur to Egypt

By around 2600 BC, lapis had reached the royal cemetery at Ur in Mesopotamia, more than two thousand kilometres from Badakhshan. There it was used in some of the most elaborate objects of the Sumerian court. The Standard of Ur sets pieces of intensely blue lapis beside shell and red limestone, while the celebrated lyres from the cemetery bring together lapis, shell, gold and other materials.

Winged Scarab Pectoral of Tutankhamun, Egypt Museum

Lapis also reached Egypt, which had no known source of its own. The stone travelled from the mines of Badakhshan across an extraordinary distance before being carved in Egypt into beads, amulets and scarabs and worked into jewelry alongside gold, turquoise and carnelian. Its rarity, brilliant colour and imported origin made lapis a particularly prized material. By the fourteenth century BC, lapis also appeared among the jewelry and funerary objects buried with Tutankhamun, alongside Egyptian-made blue materials such as faience and coloured glass.

From Lājvard to Ultramarine

Michelangelo, Giudizo Universale, Sistine Chapel

Its movement can even be followed through language. Persian lājvard, a word for both the stone and its blue, passed through Arabic and European languages, leaving descendants including lazuli, azure and azul. In Persian poetry, Sanai of Ghazni described the night sky as a kārgāh-e lājvard, a workshop of lapis. In Europe, pigment made by grinding and processing the stone became known as ultramarine, from the Latin ultramarinus, “beyond the sea.” By the Renaissance, it was among the most expensive pigments available, famously reserved for passages such as the robes of the Virgin Mary. Only with the invention of synthetic ultramarine in the nineteenth century could the colour finally be produced without the stone making its long journey from Central Asia.

The Geography of Lapis Today

The geography of lapis itself remained unchanged. Control of the mines and the routes leading from them has repeatedly made the stone vulnerable to whoever holds power in Badakhshan. In 2016, Global Witness documented how revenue from lapis mining had become entangled with armed groups and the Taliban, despite an Afghan government ban on mining introduced the previous year. Since the Taliban returned to power in 2021, independent information about conditions at the mines has become considerably harder to obtain.

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For our collaboration with ISHKAR, the landscape from which the stone emerged became the starting point. Kokcha Valley, along with the mountains and ravines surrounding it, sparked inspiration for this new collection at Iaia. Throughout the collection, lapis and geometric forms play an important role in visualizing the story of the stone’s trade routes and connecting Afghanistan to various parts of the globe.