Two Ancient Near East Glass & Faience Bead Necklaces, 92 Beads

Near East, Anatolia, Eastern Mediterranean and Western Asia. A collection of ninety-two ancient glass and faience beads, sixty-three strung on the shorter strand and twenty-nine on the longer, restrung on modern cord to be worn. The assemblage reads like a compressed history of the bead maker's art: trailed and combed feather patterns in cream and cobalt, red-and-white chevron festoons, folded mosaic canes, tiny stratified eye beads, ribbed melon forms, and plain wound discs in slate blue, ochre, oxblood, and near-black. Forms range from stout barrels and elongated cylinders to squat annular spacers. Centuries of burial have etched and softened many surfaces, and several beads carry areas of shimmering iridescence where the glass has weathered into films of silver, rose, and pale green. Cultural attributions span Phoenician, Egyptian, Parthian, Amlash, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, and Medieval Islamic workshops. Glass beads were among the most mobile goods of the ancient world, small enough to cross deserts in a saddlebag and valuable enough to be worth the journey. The Phoenicians industrialized the trade, carrying rod-formed and mosaic beads from Levantine workshops across the Mediterranean; Egyptian faience, a sintered quartz paste glazed with copper salts, supplied the blue-green forms that imitated turquoise and lapis for those who could not afford either. Later, Parthian and Sasanian glasshouses in Western Asia and, after them, Islamic workshops from Syria to Persia refined the folded mosaic and trailed feather techniques visible here. The iridescence prized by collectors is in fact decay: alkali leaches from the glass surface over centuries of burial, leaving microscopic laminated layers that diffract light into the silver and rose sheen seen on several beads. It cannot be manufactured convincingly, which makes it one of the more reliable field indicators of genuine antiquity. Item # 204590

Estimate:$800

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