Head bead with eyes and prunts, 500-300 BC
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This barrel-shaped eye bead consists of a translucent aquamarine glass base bead decorated with stratified eyes and rows of prunts(a blob of glass attached to the bead). The clarity and color intensity of the base bead is exceptional for an artifact of this age. On the side are seven eyes made of six layers of colored glass: translucent violet-blue, white, brown, white, brown, and white again. On each end are seven white and seven yellow prunts, in a staggered arrangement over two rows. Spaer (2001:86) notes that beads with stratified eyes and prunts “usually in two rows, placed at both bead ends” (such as British Museum #1868.5-1.54) are closely related to head beads, and that head beads are clearly related to Phoenician head pendants. Stern and Nolte (1994) further assert that “The eyes of the cylindrical beads symbolize faces like those on head pendants and face beads, but with the faces reduced to their most potent feature: the eyes, believed to offer protection against the evil eye. . . The face has been reduced to two large eyes between smaller dots representing ears or earrings”. Despite the similarity with Phoenician head pendants, Spaer (2001:86) writes that “Presumably, the head beads are mainly of western Mediterranean manufacture”. Indeed, the Museo Arqueologico in Madrid displays a string of beads found in the Balearic island of Ibiza and dated to 500-300 BC that is identical to ours, and a tomb of 400-200 BC in the necropolis of Fontana Noa in Sardinia contained a slightly more complex variation on the design (see Moscati 1988:489, 484). Parallels: “Circular and cylindrical beads from Ibiza, 5th-4th century BC. Sand-core glass, Madrid Museo Arqueologico Nacional” (Moscati 1988:489). “Rod-formed finial with stratified eyes. fig. 39. made in Carthage or on the Syro-Palestinian coast. Fourth to Third century BC” (Stern and Schlick-Nolte 1994:195, #39). Eye Beads Beads ornamented with spots or other circular designs that we believe represented eyes represent a very large proportion of all beads made in antiquity. Spaer (2001:77) writes: “The earliest glass eye beads were. . . a spot on a contrasting ground, or a spot with contrasting rings. This ‘spot and ring’ design—occasionally a spot alone—made in glass and added to a basic glass bead eventually became the standard type of glass eye bead. The eye symbol has always played an important role in magic beliefs and practices. Eye beads were commonly seen as apotropaic [apotropaic: having the power to prevent evil or bad luck], their primary function being that of protecting against the ‘Evil Eye.’. . . Seen from a more general perspective, the Evil Eye concept can be regarded as symbolizing the fears and anxieties we all face. It is indeed encountered in diverse cultures and periods of time. . . Even so, there may have been instances in which eye beads were appreciated more for their decorative value. Any symbol in use for a long time is likely to become part of convention and tradition and lose some of its magical application in the process.” The earliest types of eye beads (first half of the 1st millennium BC) were made by applying a trail from a molten rod of glass of a contrasting color onto a base bead—essentially drawing circles on the surface of the bead. Around the 7th century BC, the stratified technique became most common, where the craftsman made the eye and its ring by applying pre-made disks of decreasing size on top of each other. A broken stratified eye bead shows all these layers (or ‘strata’) in cross-section. Stratified eyes can be made in several manners. The layers can be built right on the bead, first applying the outer ring, then a middle ring, then the center of the eye. This is very difficult because one is working with hot, softened glass and shapes are difficult to maintain. Alternately, the whole stratified eye could be pre-made, then applied onto the base bead, which presumably provided more control. The eye could be pre-made face up, or face down, letting the softened ring disks sag around the inner layers. Eventually, craftsmen premanufactured whole strips of several eyes that were inserted as a row on the base bead. During the 3rd century a faster eye forming method gained the favor of the more technologically advanced workshop: the mosaic eye. Once a shop had the know-how to manufacture stocks of mosaic cane with concentric circles, it was much faster to insert a slice of that mosaic cane into a base bead than to manufacture eyes individually. Not all shops were able to produce mosaic cane (or purchase pre-made mosaic cane) from others, and so both techniques remained in use. Glass Beads When glass first became widespread as a new medium available to antique craftsmen, around 1550 BC, it was a luxury item used either as an ersatz for semiprecious stones, or as an analog to stone offering new exciting colors unavailable in natural stone. Since one of the established uses for semiprecious stones was to manufacture ornamental beads, glass beadmaking was a natural evolution of existing traditions. The first glass beads of the bronze age were, like most precious stones, monochrome. Soon, they became bichrome with the addition of trailed decoration. But as the period of prosperity of the second millennium came to an end, and the market for luxury goods dried up, the whole glass industry stalled for hundreds of years. With improving general conditions, glassworking shops reopened, and with the 9th century came a new distinctive type of bead: the Aegean triangular eye bead, presenting three protruding eyes applied to a base bead. The 8th and 7th century saw an important paradigm shift from opaque, stone-like, glass to considerable experimentation with the translucence of glass. It is during the 6th century, which saw a marked expansion in glass production in general, that more technically complex beads such as stratified eye beads became frequent. One gets a sense that glass workers were driven to compete in technical prowess. Trailing and layering would be the state of the art for the next three hundred years, until Hellenistic glassworkers developed and applied glass drawing techniques to beadmaking. Multicolored and concentric rods and mosaic bars considerably enriched the repertoire of bead decoration, and brought about a blossoming of beadmaking techniques. They also further divided the skills: the raw glass ingots could be made in one shop, the drawn canes or bars used for decoration in another, and the beads in a third, not necessarily in the same country. Although the invention of glass blowing, around the end of the millennium, did not technically affect beadmaking, as blowing is not applicable to the manufacture of beads, it had a profound economic impact on all glass. The new affordability of glass vessels made glass a high volume industry, with increasingly uniformly high quality products. The economic machinery and the safety of commercial routes brought by the might and extent of the Roman Empire also made for a free flow of goods and artisans throughout the Empire. With the decline of the Roman Empire came a slow decline in the quality of glass goods. Until the rise of Venetian glassmaking in the 15th century, glassworkers were by and large content with replicating the styles invented by their predecessors. With the exception of the new palette of brilliant colors developed by Islamic glassworkers between the 9th and 12th century, and despite continued strong demand for glass beads, beadmaking had reached a plateau. Determining the origin and age of glass beads is difficult. Even when you are lucky enough to know the context in which a bead was retrieved, is does not firmly establish its origin, as beads are durable jewels that travel well. People in antiquity were avid for products from afar, and just as prone to collect items from previous centuries as we are ourselves are. Some styles of beads may have been made especially for exportation, and therefore be more common outside of their area of production. The will to overcome these circumstantial difficulties has only recently been found in the archaeological community which initially found little interest in the study of beads, with the exception of a precious few, including Flinders Petrie, proving once again his status as a true visionary. The publication of Maud Spaer’s extensive catalog of Beads and other small objects from the Israel Museum in 2001 constitutes a pioneering step towards recognition of beads as a significant class of archaeological treasures. Bibliography (for this item)Moscati, Sabatino1988 The Phoenicians. Abbeville Press, New York, NY. (484,489) Spaer, Maud 2001 Ancient glass in the Israel Museum: beads and other small objects. The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. (86) Stern, E. Marianne, and Birgit Schlick-Nolte 1994 Early Glass of the Ancient World 1600 BC - AD 50 Ernesto Wolf Collection. Gerd Hatje, Ostfildern, Germany. (195 # 39) Bibliography (on Eye Beads)Spaer, Maud2001 Ancient glass in the Israel Museum: beads and other small objects. The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Bibliography (on Glass Beads)Spaer, Maud2001 Ancient glass in the Israel Museum: beads and other small objects. The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. |
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