Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE GROWTH OF THE DIAMOND TRADE centuries, probably thousands of years, diamonds were a royal perquisite. They blazoned the regal state of Oriental princes, and were a sign of autocratic power. Ordinary trade in them was confined to small and poor stones and the few fine ones which escaped the requisitions of the rulers where they were found. Little is known of the ancient traffic in diamonds. It is said the the Arabs and Phoenicians traded in them. They were not only used as jewels, but as cutters and gravers for centuries B. C, therefore they must have been carried far and wide throughout the Orient; but literature had small space for commerce in those days. Though we read of the uses to which they were put, we know little of the channels by which they were gathered and distributed. As far as we know, they were found only in India, but later discoveries of very ancient mining operations in Rhodesia, suggest that they were also taken from Africa many centuries ago. The diamond fields of India were confined to a comparatively small section of the country in the southern central part of India back from the eastern coast; in the Deccan, near the banks of the Godavari, Krishna and Pannar rivers and the country lying between them; and a section farther north on the banks of the Mahanadi, in the Panna district ofthe country known as Bundelkhand. The latter are supposed to be the oldest diamond mines of India, though the more southerly diggings which include the Golconda district, are more famous. From a Dutchman named Van Linschoten, we learn something of the way in which mining was conducted in India late in the sixteenth century. Writing in 1596 of the mines in the kingdom of Bisnager whose capital was at Hampi in the Bellary district, he said, " The diamon...