Gemstones
Swala Gem Traders
| Tuesday 12 February 2008 | 5 comments |
In October 2007, my brother Mark called while I was travelling in Europe to let me know he suspected that Tanzania was unveiling yet another gem deposit. "I think we're on top of something big again. An important spessartite discovery seems to have taken place in the northern part of the country".
| Monday 11 February 2008 | 2 comments |
Many accounts of the discovery of tanzanite have found their way into print, most of them quite misleading or simply wrong.
| Monday 11 February 2008 | 1 comment |
Magnificent Jewels - Sotherby's - Geneva May 21st 1997.
Getting into a Sotherby's sale ten years ago with big tsavorite garnets wasn't that easy. Mark was quite proud to have been able to work this out.
| Wednesday 6 February 2008 | no comment |
Tanzania continues to pour forth riches. This was the beginning of a news item in the Jewelers' Circular-Keystone in July 1970. The article goes on to say that in addition to tanzanite and chrome-tourmaline (which were then new materials for jewelers), Tanzania had produced a new type of garnet "gleaming red at night and green in daylight".
| Wednesday 6 February 2008 | no comment |
Those who have read Out of Africa or An Ice Cream War, or remember Bogart in The African Queen, will know that "The Great War" was also fought in Africa. But they are unlikely to have heard of the Battle of Merkerstein, a minor skirmish in the northern part of Tanzania, which was then part of German East Africa (Deutsch-Ostafrika).
| Wednesday 6 February 2008 | no comment |
Even geologists rarely appreciate the great age of East Africa's Rift Valley System. Rifts are formed and are later completely filled-in by erosion as their shoulders collapse and wash down into the valley below.
| Wednesday 6 February 2008 | no comment |
The first gemstone deposit to be found in East Africa was the ruby deposit at Longido, Tanzania. Other ruby deposits were discovered in Tanzania subsequently, most of them of the anyolite type, as at Longido, but production was generally small or of poor quality gems or of rubies which had been fractured in attempting to free them from their host rock. Then in mid-1973, our father received a visit from a Park Ranger from Tsavo West National Park.
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