Every diamond is older than almost anything you will ever hold. Most of the diamonds worn today formed between one and three and a half billion years ago, crystallising from pure carbon around 150 kilometres or more beneath the earth's surface, before ancient volcanic eruptions carried them upwards. By the time a diamond reaches a jeweller's bench, it has already outlived empires.
Its human story is far shorter, and far more dramatic. It moves from sacred riverbeds to royal treasuries, from candlelit courts to mining camps, and from a young mathematician's calculations to the grading laboratory. This is how the diamond became the stone we know today.
India: Where It All Began
For well over a thousand years, India was the world's only known source of diamonds. They were not dug from deep mines but gathered by hand from the gravels of riverbeds, where water had carried them far from their original rock. The earliest known written reference to diamonds appears in a Sanskrit text from the late fourth century BC, which already treats them as objects of value and trade.
The most celebrated stones were traded through Golconda, the great city of the Deccan, whose name became shorthand for diamonds of exceptional whiteness and purity. Several of history's most famous gems trace their origins to these deposits — among them the Koh-i-Noor, now part of the British Crown Jewels.
It was the Greeks who gave the stone its name. They called it adamas — unconquerable — a tribute to a hardness that made it almost impossible to scratch, and impossible to forget.
Medieval Courts and the First Cutters
Diamonds travelled west along the great trade routes, and by the late Middle Ages they were appearing in the jewels of European royalty. In those early centuries they were prized for their hardness and their mirror-like lustre rather than their sparkle, and they were worn mostly by men, as emblems of power and invincibility. That began to change in the fifteenth century, when Agnès Sorel, a favourite at the French court of Charles VII, is said to have set a new fashion by wearing diamonds herself.
Shaping a diamond was a challenge in its own right, because only a diamond can cut a diamond. The earliest European cutters simply polished the stone's natural crystal faces to create what is now called the point cut, and by 1375 a guild of diamond polishers was already working in Nuremberg. In the fifteenth century, cutters began grinding away the top of the crystal to create a flat table. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the rose cut — a dome of triangular facets over a flat base — had emerged in Antwerp, the city that would become the heart of the diamond-cutting world for centuries to come.
1477: The First Diamond Engagement Ring
The most famous diamond moment of the fifteenth century came in 1477. Archduke Maximilian of Austria, preparing for his betrothal to Mary of Burgundy, was advised in writing to present her with a ring set with a diamond as well as a ring of plain gold. He did — and in doing so gave what is widely regarded as the first documented diamond engagement ring.
The stone was modest by today's standards, almost certainly a simple table cut, but the symbolism was perfect: a gem believed to be unbreakable, offered to seal a union meant to last. The idea spread slowly among Europe's nobility, and it would take nearly five centuries to become the custom it is today.
Brazil, Then South Africa
By the early eighteenth century, India's riverbeds were running dry. In 1725 diamonds were discovered in Brazil, and for roughly the next century and a half Brazil was the world's main source.
Then, in the late 1860s, a fifteen-year-old named Erasmus Jacobs picked up a shining pebble near the Orange River in South Africa. It proved to be a 21.25-carat diamond, later named the Eureka. Larger finds soon followed, and within a few years one of the greatest rushes in history was under way. Prospectors poured in from around the world, the town of Kimberley grew up around the diggings, and its name was given to kimberlite — the volcanic rock in which diamonds travel to the surface.
For the first time, diamonds were being mined from their source rock on an industrial scale. In 1905, South Africa produced the largest gem-quality rough diamond ever found: the Cullinan, at more than 3,100 carats, later cut into stones that now sit among the British Crown Jewels.
The Twentieth Century: Brilliance, Romance and a Shared Language
In 1919, Marcel Tolkowsky — a young Antwerp-born engineer from a family of diamond cutters — published Diamond Design. Using the science of how light travels through a stone, he worked out the angles and proportions that would give a round diamond the finest balance of brilliance and fire. His calculations became the foundation of the modern round brilliant, still the world's most popular cut.
In 1947, a copywriter named Frances Gerety, working late at the N.W. Ayer advertising agency on the De Beers account, wrote four words that would reshape the meaning of engagement: "A Diamond Is Forever." First used in 1948 and later named the slogan of the century by Advertising Age, the line helped turn the diamond engagement ring from an aristocratic custom into an expectation around the world.
In 1953, the Gemological Institute of America introduced its International Diamond Grading System, built around the four Cs: cut, colour, clarity and carat weight. Developed under Richard T. Liddicoat, it gave the trade a shared vocabulary for the first time, so that a dealer in Antwerp, a jeweller in New York and a buyer in Dubai could describe the same stone in exactly the same terms.
And in December 1954, a team at General Electric produced the first laboratory-grown diamond made by a repeatable, verified process. The earliest were tiny and suited only to industry; gem-quality crystals followed in 1970. Today, laboratory-grown diamonds are a genuine choice in fine jewelry — the same material as a natural diamond, grown above ground rather than beneath it.
Dubai and the Diamond Today
The modern story of the diamond runs straight through our home. Through the Dubai Diamond Exchange at DMCC, Dubai has become the world's largest hub for the trade in rough and polished diamonds. In 2025 alone, diamond trade through the emirate reached a record US$41.7 billion, the vast majority of it in natural stones.
It is a remarkable turn in a very old story. The same stone that once travelled by caravan from the riverbeds of India now passes through Dubai on its way to every corner of the world.
Choosing Your Own Chapter
A diamond's history is measured in billions of years and thousands of miles. Yours begins the moment you choose it.
At Dominium, every stone is selected through our three-tier diamond standard: Heritage, natural diamonds graded by GIA; Signature, natural diamonds graded by IGI; and Contemporary, laboratory-grown diamonds graded by IGI. Each tier is chosen with the same care, so whichever you choose, the stone at the heart of your piece is worthy of the story it will carry.
To understand the four Cs before you choose, read our Diamond Guide or our journal piece on choosing a diamond that carries meaning.
Considering a bespoke diamond piece? Book a private consultation with the Dominium team.
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