Gallery

Comments

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  Ethnic Embellishments February 22, 2012 at 4:47pm

  Lovely end-caps and beads!
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  Harald February 22, 2012 at 5:11pm

  Nice necklace! Please tell me what is the meaning of "urban harz" ?
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  Anna Garner February 22, 2012 at 5:57pm

  Have I used those words somewhere?  "Harz may be an alternate spelling for hirz, which is an amulet.  The word "urban" used to describe a hirz I do not understand.  I hope I have not misspelled something in my descriptions.  A "city amulet" does not mean anything to me.  Sorry if I have typed such a phrase somewhere.  
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  Harald February 22, 2012 at 9:57pm

  Harz=resin, the stuff amber and copal is made of in a very distant past
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  Anna Garner February 22, 2012 at 11:22pm

  Thank you for explaining what harz means.  Urban resin???   I know that the Yemeni dealer that I am somewhat acquainted with calls manufactured amber *faturan*, but urban harz I have never heard of.  
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  Harald February 23, 2012 at 9:57am

  It is of course not really important I was just curious.

  I have also seen these red beads on your necklace in Egype. A Yemeni necklace of mine has them too, I suppose they are made of a kind of phenolic resin.
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  Anna Garner February 23, 2012 at 1:51pm

  I believe they probably are related to the kind of synthetic resin that France began making in the early decades of the 1900s.  It was first made to mimic ivory because the substance that Americans called *bakelite* could be shaped into any kind of bead, ring or bracelet, could be carved in the Far Eastern manner, and had the dense quality-- but not the veining or propensity to crack -- as ivory had.   The manufacturers evidently soon discovered that somewhat transparent streaks could be added and a bit more color could be added to mimic the more opaque young fossil amber of Yemen.  

  I believe that the faturan and what some call faux amber, and many others call resin amber or more appropriately amber resin, amber being the color but not the substance.  I do have a couple of magnificent strings of the amber of the young fossilized resin from the frankincense trees in Yemen.  They still perfume the drawer of the storage chest after all these decades.  In addition to the fragrance, the beads are shaped by hand and are very charming in their irregularity.  
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  Harald February 23, 2012 at 6:54pm

  Thanks for this explanation Anna. Do you have a picture of what the "young fossilized resin from the frankincence tree" is looking like? It would be nice for us to see.  Is it about the same age as copal or still younger?
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  Anna Garner February 23, 2012 at 9:13pm

  The recently extracted resin from the Boswellia or frankincense tree is discussed in an article on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankincense    As for the relation of frankincense amber to copal, here is an article on the copal *amber* that has been found in Arabia and parts of Africa: http://www.arabian-archaeology.com/incense2fossil.htm      I suspect that since Roman times, when amber resin became widely used in medicine, the supply of young fossil resins began to be exhausted.  From very early times, I believe that most bead makers used the seasonal extraction of the resin from the Boswellia tree and simply subjected it to heat and pressure to make the fragrant beads.  Now even those are rare enough to force a price increase in the phenolic and other synthetic resin beads.  Here is an interesting article on the incense route through Southern Arabia: http://www.fathom.com/course/21701787/session3.html   

  I will not be using the word fossil to describe my frankincense amber beads.  If I have mistakenly done so, please allow me to correct it here.  The resin that is collected hardens in the atmosphere, and it does resemble the unpolished amber chips from the Baltic region.  There are photos of the resins in the articles that I cited.  I hope you enjoy reading these articles.  I found them quite interesting.
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  Harald February 23, 2012 at 10:37pm

   

  What interesting sites you mention in your comment. Thanks very much for all this info!

  Specially the info about copal is interesting because so much of that stuff is used as beads in the jewelry some of us collect. I have been telling other collectors and dealers that in my opinion a lot of North African "amber" beads were made of copal or a kind of plastic. But people kept saying it is no copal or (worse) plastic but Baltic amber.

  And an other fact of interest is that old pharaonic beads, that I thought to be baltic amber, can be copal too.