Hettie Judah - Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones

The heads of two vast, unblinking Gorgons stare out between the stone columns of Istanbuls palatial underground cistern. Built in the sixth century, during the reign of Justinian I, the cistern was part of the great Byzantine emperors transformation of the city. Fifteen centuries of drip and submersion have bathed these severed heads an otherworldly algal green. They werent designed to be here, positioned the wrong way up, supporting columns in the damp darkness. Medusas petrifying stare once held a protective position overlooking a far earlier structure. Lifted from a despoiled pagan site they were repositionedand robbed of their talismanic powerby the Christian emperors stonemasons.

Medusas myth is a story of stone: the only mortal among the three Gorgon sisters, Perseus beheaded her with the adamantine sword Harpe. Her posthumous gaze could petrify all manner of things: Ovid described Perseus gently placing Medusas head in a soft bed of shoreline leaves while he stooped to wash his hands, and the plants transforming into the first corals.

A snake-haired woman whose gaze could turn living matter to stone seems an apt response to a world punctuated by monoliths, needles, fairy chimneys, stalagmites, and boulders all of which look worryingly poised to spring to life. A petrifying gaze is no more implausible than the belief that a solitary diamond might bind two people in eternal love. Or that mountains grow, continents move, and treasures push up from the bowels of the Earth. We humans find it easier to think of abstract notions such as eternity than to enter the geological imagination and follow clues in stone that lead back over four and a half billion years to the fiery origins of our planet.

Historically, stories have helped us make sense of the incomprehensible duration of the world. Tales of an ancient flood helped explain why the shells of sea creatures can be seen in rocks on a mountaintop. Vast fossilized bones and teeth exposed in crumbling cliff faces or washed up on the shore offered evidence of giants that once ruled the earth. Sometimes a rock split to expose the body of an ancient monster. The spectacle of stalactites and stalagmites growing in limestone caves revealed the miracle of stony birth: lithic matter forming in the womb of Mother Earth.

As well as evidence of a long and mysterious past, stone has provided the tools of human progress, from the earliest rough projectiles, through cutting and grinding implements, to the rare minerals that power the present-day information age. As human adornment, stones are associated with wealth, and often, by extension, corruption. Invading armies covered themselves with finery in a show of power and plundered the mineral treasures of a conquered territory: jewels were ransacked from treasuries; gems, jades, and marbles extracted from the Earth; and the carved stones of temples and palaces plundered, to take up new positions in structures like Justinians cistern.

As humans told stories, and conceived ever more elaborate relationships with their environments, bright pebbles and other lithic treasures were selected to accompany bodies into the afterlife. Markers within the landscape furnished details of creation stories: twinned hollows high in the rock were the eyes of a trickster spirit pursuing sisters across hundreds of miles of dusty territory; pinnacles and slits in the living rock were the dormant reproductive organs of titanic mountain deities. As pigment paint, or handheld totems, stone was used to express veneration for the spirits that animated mysterious, mutable phenomena: the moon and the tides, winds and weather, abundance and fertility. Monoliths marked out sacred sites and provided a framework for rituals.