Sky Blue Stone: The Turquoise Trade in World History

This book traces the journey of a stone across the world. From its point of origin in the city of Nishapur in eastern Iran, turquoise was traded through India, Central Asia, the Near East, Europe, and ultimately the Americas. Along this trail unfolds the story of turquoise--a phosphate of aluminum and copper formed by nature in rocks below the surface of the earth--and its discovery and export as a global commodity.

In early modern Eurasia, turquoise was regarded as a sacred object and blue a sacred color in the material culture and imperial regalia of Islamic tributary empires, a potent symbol of power projected in vivid color displays. Arash Khazeni then follows the stone's history throughout Europe, where it became coveted as an exotic object from the "East." The Eurasian turquoise trade lasted into the nineteenth century, when the oldest mines in Iran collapsed and lost Aztec mines in the Americas reopened, unearthing more accessible sources of the stone to rival the Persian blue.

Students, scholars, and interested historians will discover and appreciate the origins and circulation of this natural object, while also gaining greater understanding of the history of Islamic Eurasia in the context of world environmental processes and global encounters between nature and empire.