green beryl exists locally in Egypt. Items carved from emerald are known from as early as the 12th Dynasty, 1900s BCE, during the Bronze Age. But these emeralds are random finds, and not actively mined until the Ptolemaic period. Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemies, is famous for her love for the Egyptian emerald. Other minerals resembling emerald are heliodor (taking into account the implication of Smaragdos that it was green) and rock crystal (ignoring the literal meaning of Smaragdos, since the masoretic text does not appear to specify colour); there is much to be said for Smaragdos being either of those. Although "emerald" is the most common form used to describe the Hebrew word, bareḳet, in other sources (e.g. the Septuagint on Ezekiel 28:13), the word bareḳet is rendered as "onyx". Aquilas the proselyte (Onkelos), in his Aramaic translation of the Pentateuch, writes בָרקָן = barḳan, for this word. According to the Midrash Rabba (Numbers Rabba 2:7), the stone called bareḳet had veins or parallel bands of colours white, black and red running through it, suggesting that it may have actually been a kind of agate or onyx. This may explain why in some French translations the word is rendered as "agate". In the South Arabian dialect spoken in Yemen during the Middle Ages, baḳarani (believed to be a corruption of barḳan) was an exceptionally beautiful and rare onyx stone mined on Mount Anis, in Yemen, one variety of which having a red surface with a vein of white over another of black running through it. Symmachus, an ancient Jewish translator whose Greek translation of the Pentateuch appeared in Origen's Hexapla, has also written κεραύνιος, literally meaning ‘of a thunderbolt’, and a more direct translation of the stone known in Hebrew as bareḳet relating to baraḳ ‘lightning’ in Exodus 28:17. Jerome, however, understood the Greek word to mean "onyx". Second row Nofekh (נֹפֶךְ = in the masoretic text) / Anthrax (in the Septuagint) – while Anthrax simply means coal (presumably here referring to the colour of burning coal), the Vulgate here has Carbunculus, referring to the carbuncle, which was red. Philo of Alexandria, when writing about this stone, says that it was red. He seems to be in agreement with Josephus, the LXX, and the Jerusalem Targum, the latter saying that it is כדכדנא, explained by Saadia Gaon as meaning karkand, a red variety of precious stone. Nofekh appears