The Indian subcontinent has been the home of bead making for millennia, beginning as early as the founding of the Indus Valley civilization at Harappa (modern Pakistan) before 3000 BCE. Many of the products acquired and used by The Egyptians and Near Eastern cultures were either made by Harappan craftsmen, or the technology was exported to those regions.

While the production of artistic stone beads developed as early as about 5000 BCE, it was in the third millennium that hard stones were carefully selected for color and structural beauty, then enhanced to be more attractive, and finally worked into remarkable ornaments.

By about 2,500 BCE, craftsmen had learned to decorate agates by the application of a painted-on solution that allowed them to create any design they could imagine—and so were born what we have (mistakenly) come to call “etched agates,” or more properly “chemically decorated stone beads.” These were made at various times and places even into the 20th century—and are among the most celebrated and desired artifacts of antiquity.