Guilding the Stone - August Trivia Quiz

Answer: green

Peridots come in various shades of green, from a pale yellowish-green to olive green to a bright green that is roughly the same shade as new grass or new leaf growth. The purer the colour of the stone, the higher its value. While other gemstones come in a variety of colours, peridot is the only gemstone that comes in only one colour, albeit in varying shades.

Answer: Arizona

Arizona has the highest production levels of peridot, although the stones found there are not of the highest value. The most valuable peridots are found in Pakistan, Egypt and Myanmar.

Answer: The French

Perhaps the name was changed when it was discovered that peridot and topaz do not have the same chemical formula. Topaz is an aluminum fluorite silicate with the formula Al2F2SiO4, while peridot is a magnesium iron silicate bearing the formula (MgFe)2SiO4.

Answer: Married happiness

Those who are fortunate enough to have the peridot/sardonyx as a birthstone are assured of a happy marriage. I'm not superstitious, but my marriage was very happy, so maybe there's something to that superstition. On the other hand, my husband's birthstone for June was the pearl (or the moonstone or the aquamarine), any one of which was supposed to guarantee him health and longevity. In his case, that wasn't true, since he died in his mid-sixties after 13 years of chronic illness!

Just in case you're interested, the other birthstones offer these gifts:
January's garnet - constancy; February's amethyst - sincerity; March's bloodstone or aquamarine - courage; April's diamond - innocence; May's emerald - love and success; July's ruby - contentment; September's sapphire - clear thinking; October's opal or tourmaline - hope; November's topaz - fidelity; December's turquoise or zircon - prosperity.

Answer: True

The peridot is generally mistranslated as topaz in the accounts of the breastplate found in scripture, but in the Hebrew texts it is pitdah, a word of Assyrian derivation meaning flashed, and most modern scholars translate pitdah as peridot.

Answer: Egyptian

The Egyptians believed that those who prospected for peridots could not do so during daylight hours because peridots were thought to be invisible in sunlight. Consequently, peridot miners worked in darkness, relying on torchlight to locate the lambent gems. Often they would mark the location of the find, then return to mine the gems in daylight hours.

Answer: Washington, D.C.

The world's largest faceted peridot, a 310-carat monster, is on display at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. It was mined on St. John's Island (aka Zebargad - the Arabic word for peridot) in the Red Sea. The world's second largest peridot is housed in the Diamond Treasury in Moscow. It weighs in at 192.75 carats and was once part of the imperial collection of the Tsars.

Zebargad has been a source of peridot since 1500 BC. At one time it was known as Serpent Island because it was infested with poisonous snakes. One of the pharaohs had all the snakes destroyed and the peridot miners were confined to the island. Because the stones were so coveted, it was customary in those days to kill any unwary traveller sailing too close to the island or attempting a landing!

Answer: Cleopatra

Cleopatra is known to have had a predilection for the peridot and some historians believe that descriptions of her famed emeralds are actually descriptions of peridots, which are colloquially known as Evening Emeralds. Egyptian peridots come primarily from St. John's Island and are the darkest green of all peridots, which accounts for their being confused with emeralds.

I could find no reference as to which jewels were preferred by Hatshepsut, the female pharaoh, Nefertiti, wife of Akhenaton, or Nefertari, chief wife of Ramses II.

Answer: Pele's tears

Minute peridots can be found in the sand on the beaches of the Hawaiian Islands and the folklore of Hawaii refers to them as the tears of the Volcano goddess Pele.

Kanaloa is the Hawaiian god of the ocean, Hinaleuluiau is the Hawaiian goddess of rain and Kane is the creator god in Hawaiian tradition.

Answer: All of these

The largest deposit of peridot in the United States is on the San Carlos Apache reservation in Arizona and only the Apache are allowed to mine it, having been granted the mineral rights by the U.S. government.

Because the Apache, like most native North Americans, see themselves as part of nature rather than its rulers, the mining of gemstones like peridot is done by hand, and it is done prayerfully. The miners, their tools and the mines are prayed over by the shamans before work commences.