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Barnebys HQ
Brahegatan 10
BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Jewelry & Gems / Egyptian Sinai Turquoise Bead Necklace, Melon Gold Spacers
Egypt, Late Dynastic to Roman period. A long strand of tumbled turquoise beads alternating with small fluted gold spacers, each stone polished to an irregular ovoid or teardrop and ranging from pale celadon through mottled green to a deeper blue-green, the natural veining and matrix left visible. The gold elements are melon-shaped, their vertical ribs chased or drawn into thin sheet, and they punctuate the strand at regular intervals so the strung necklace reads as a rhythm of warm metal against cool stone. A simple hook closure finishes one end. Turquoise, quarried in the Sinai and the Eastern Desert, carried associations with renewal and protection in Egyptian thought, and beads of this type served both as personal adornment in life and as furnishing for the burial. Turquoise (Egyptian mefkat) was mined from at least the Old Kingdom at Wadi Maghara and Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai, where the goddess Hathor was venerated as "Lady of Turquoise". Its blue-green range was read as the color of new growth and rebirth, placing it alongside faience and glazed composition in the Egyptian palette of regenerative hues. Ribbed or melon-form gold spacers appear widely across the eastern Mediterranean in the later first millennium BCE and into the Roman era, produced from thin sheet over a core or drawn into fluted tubes, a technique that gave maximum visual presence for minimal weight of metal. Item # 205230
Estimate:$850
To the auctionView all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorJewelry & Gems
Estimate:
$850
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