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Summary

One can find no other mineral that exhibits beauty in such numerous variations than jasper.

The beauty of jasper is, in fact, one more testimony of Nature’s riches and generosity, while articles made of this stone may be described as a fitting embodiment of Man’s unique talent, industry and spirituality.

For a master stone-carver and a historian of the science of rocks, for an ethnographer engaged in the study of trades and for an art critic jasper has a story of its own to tell.

Man has known jasper for thousands of years. He formed his elementary working habits as he pursued his search for better ways of treating it. This gave birth to a trade and a craftsmanship. Which, in its turn, led, at a later date, to the creation of masterpieces of genuine artistry. It took about one hundred years to subjugate jasper. The primitive ideas of the earlier periods were abandoned in favour of laboratory research by a modern petrographer as the steadily augmenting know-how was handed down from one generation to another.

Jasper was duly appreciated in the Paleolithic age for its durability, uniform structure and hardness and for this reason became the basic material of its stone industry.

The ancient world discovered the beauty of polished surfaces and, enchanted by the wealth of this stone’s colours and lines, came to link jasper with various superstitions and beliefs. Antiquity gave it its name and left to posterity a vast variety of forms of cut jasper. The middle ages, for their part, “canonized” jasper, as it were, by declaring it one of the twelve “sacred” stones worthy of being word by priests as ornaments in their attire. During the Renaissance the beauty of jasper inspired vivid poetic associations which helped to convert the mere artisan of yesterday into a genuine master of the stone, the veritable poet of jasper. In the 18^th century novel qualities of jasper became revealed: its monolith forms, enormous reserves and limitless variety. Descriptions of its deposits were undertaken and a classification of the stone was produced on the basis of its continuing study. The following centuries saw a search for an answer to one of the most amazing riddles: the varied nature and origin of jasper.

Our narration in thus of the history of Urals jasper, the first ancient seats of the jasper industry in the southern Urals, of the jasper mounds, of the old burial mounds where numerous vary-coloured pieces of jasper lay hidden for ages… In this book the reader will find a historical outline of the initial attempts at prospecting for, and actual extracting of jasper. He will also get a glimpse of the very first quarries and be afforded an opportunity to acquaint himself

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with a few pages from the history of a unique vocational school that has been training Russian stone-carvers for more than two centuries.

At present as many as sixteen manufacturing enterprises use Urals jasper. But thanks to its “Urals Gems” Production and Technical Association which, incidentally, grew out of a lapidary factory founded as far back as 1726, it is the Urals that, as was the case in the past, is today the main centre of stone-cutting in the country. Half of the jasper reserves in the USSR falls to the share of the Urals. More than two hundred deposits and outcroppings extend in a single line, forty kilometres wide, from the Near Arctic all the way down to the steppes of Kazakhstan and the Mugodzhar mountains. Especially well known throughout the world are the varieties of jasper that come from such provenances as Urazov, Orsk, Kalkansk, Koshkuldinsk, Yamsk, Malomuinakovsk and Aushkulsk. Made famous by talented Urals craftsmen they invariably represented and continue to represent Russian and Soviet industries at international art, trade and industrial exhibitions which were, or are, held in France, Britain, Canada and Japan. Works of jasper are to be found among the exhibits displayed in the Hermitage and the Armoury, in the Louvre and the Vatican. Jasper was also used for decorative purposes. It is to be found, for example, in the rich ornaments of outstanding monuments of architecture in Moscow and Leningrad, London and Paris, Istanbul and Delhi. Interest in jasper is growing with every passing year. The jasper palette of the of the Stone Belt is being constantly enriched. About one hundred of new varieties of jasper have been explored to date. Of these, one third is earmarked for development. The tapping of these new resources, it is estimated, will make it possible not only to meet the demand for jasper of the whole of the stone-cutting industry of the USSR but also to satisfy the ever growing requirements of the foreign market.

It can be confidently asserted that rich artistic traditions, the creative searching of talented craftsmen of today’s Urals, these veritable innovators in their field, knowledge of the latest developments in progressive technology, mining and processing of jasper on the one hand, and the inexhaustible reserves of the newly discovered deposits on the other, will serve to create every pre-requisite for the further promotion of the jasper industry, its artistic level and culture in particular.