A digital archive showcasing the extensive collection of jewellery and adornment images shared on the former Ethnic Jewels Ning site over the years. These images have significantly enriched discussions on cultural adornment and its global dispersion.
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Wow I love this
Oh my goodness, Anna. This is so beautiful. The leaf pendant reminds me of jewellery from Syria. There must have been a lot of contact between Central Asia and the Middle East, in the early days, along the Silk routes.
Wow Anna this is beautiful!!
I like the main pendant a lot! Very nice, thanks for posting.
@Sarah - Thank you for your comment and for the featured photo status!
@ You are right, Thelma. The silk route ran directly through Northern Afghanistan to Kashgar? in China. Much of Turkey and Syria was once Persian, too, as well as Afghanistan. Because of the Persian language spoken there, we still identify Afghanistan as Persian, but it hosts a large Turkoman population from Central Asia.
@Eva Lea, thank you so much for the kind comments.
Very lovely indeed! How interesting to learn about the bird symbols.
Does anyone know why the Turkoman population developed its` cultural arts to the extent that it did (and does to an extent)? Was it that much more on the silk route? Was it bigger than the other groups?
I would be most interested to know.
Patti, maybe you can help me out here?
I will offer a bit of conjecture here. Being the largest population in modern Central Asia, the Turkmen or Turkoman people inherited the long tradition of the making and wearing of amuletic jewelry. The tradition dates back into Neolithic times with the Hong Shan Neolithic culture on the East side of the TianShan/ Hindu Kush mountain ranges and the later-arriving Bactria-Margiana culture on the West side. The Hongshan worked in jade and the neolithic and later Bactrians worked mainly in agate.
The Turkmen did not come down from the Altay mountains until a couple of thousand years later. But by the time they came down to the steppes, jewelry making technology was highly developed what with Alexander and the silk road having happened. So they saw a way to express their spirituality in silver, gold and carnelian instead of the wood, hair and bone amulets they had used up on the mountain.
I have not tied all this together in this very superficial rundown, but it does seem reasonable to me.
Anna
Most interesting, Anna. Thank you. It seems a very reasonable conjecture to me, too. I wonder if the Turkomen inherited their interest in decorative fabrics, embroidery and carpet weaving in the same manner. Or was it born of the amuletic tradition?
anna. it is beautiful and all in one piece. verry nice and rare. i had semilar pendent, so beautiful and complet !!! Never.
thank you for your explanation, i appreciate reading it. i learn a lot from. you know a lot about the old stone jewelry. i have one found in sahara. i post it later on. please tell me what you think about.
thank you again for posting this photo
@Frankie I believe their textile work was necessary due to their move into tents once they came down out of the forested mountains where they could provide or find shelter in other ways. They also used beautiful woven 'blankets' to protect their beloved horses. By the way, the textiles contain all the amuletic symbols that the jewelry contains. The abstraction of a ram's head -- their ancestor symbol -- is put on every possession from a clay bread oven to the finest gilded ornamentation.
Anna
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