History of Emerald Mining in the Habachtal Deposit of Austria, Part I

Abstract

eighteenth Samuel Goldschmidt, followed English 1895. The sources of emeralds used in Roman jewelry as well as jeweled pieces (including crowns and book covers) dating from antiquity to the Middle Ages and before the discovery of the Colombian emerald deposits in the sixteenth century remain an ongoing matter of controversy. Two potential localities dominate the discussion: the mines in the Eastern Desert of Egypt and the Habachtal deposit in Austria. The first published reference to the Habachtal emerald occurrence dates to 1797. The majority of publications from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries agree that Samuel Goldschmidt, a jeweler from Vienna, purchased the mountain area in which the Habachtal emerald occurrence is located and commenced mining soon thereafter, in the early 1860s. A later period from the mid-1890s to about 1914 is frequently mentioned, in which the mine was owned and worked by an English company. However, further details regarding both periods and the various transitions of ownership and further circumstances of emerald mining before World War I are rarely given and often are not consistent, and activities in the times before the 1860s and between 1870 and 1890 are obscure. Using a wide selection of materials from Austrian and German archives, largely unpublished, the author seeks to trace the history of the Habachtal mine through several centuries and to fill gaps left by existing publications.