Selection of Ethiopian opals from Commercial Mineral. (Photo: Mike Romanella)
Jewellery World in Australia has a post about opals. Opals are beautiful precious stones found all over the world. Ethiopia along with Lightning Ridge in Australia are very famous for black opals.
The Roman scholar Pliny observed in 79 AD, “Some opali carry such a play within them that they equal the deepest and richest colours of painters.”
Popular around the world, it was called úpala in Sanskrit meaning “precious stone”, and opalus in Latin and Opallios in Greek, both meaning “colour change”. The earliest known artifacts of opal were found in a cave in Kenya by famed anthropologist, Louis Leakey. Thought to date back to 4000 BCE, they were probably of Ethiopian origin.
