Rectangular base in imperial Egyptian porphyry

Small rectangular base in pre-polished Egyptian imperial red porphyry.
Can be finished to a mirror polish.

Length: 5 cm. Depth: 3.5 cm. Width: 1 cm.

(Minor chips, unfinished roughness on the underside of the base).

Egyptian imperial porphyry is particularly rare: only Roman and later Byzantine emperors could acquire this purple rock, the exclusive property of the Emperor (fiscus caesaris).

The stone's purple color was associated with "Tyrian Purple," the most expensive dye of antiquity.

This rock was all the more rare and precious as it was found in only one place on Earth: Mons Porphyrites, located in the eastern desert of Egypt (Jebel Dokhan). After the fall of the Roman Empire, the exact location of the quarry was "lost" for nearly 1,500 years before being rediscovered by explorers in the 19th century, though it was never quarried again.

Porphyry is one of the hardest rocks on the planet (7 on the Mohs scale, close to quartz).
In antiquity, it was almost impossible to carve with conventional iron tools. Its extraction required special hardened steel tools and months of polishing with emery to achieve a mirror-like shine. The creation of a single 5-meter column alone took several years of uninterrupted work for a full team of elite stonemasons. The cost of transporting it from the remote quarries of the Egyptian desert to Alexandria and then Rome was so high that a cubic foot of imperial porphyry fetched an exorbitant price of 250 denarii—the monthly wage of a skilled worker! (for a piece barely thirty centimeters long).

Because of this difficulty, quarrying of new blocks ceased after the 4th century. Almost all the porphyry seen today in churches or museums (columns, basins, sarcophagi) is reused from Roman times.

Ref: 640518820B