Ancient Jewelry

Eight pieces of Assyrian, Babylonian and Egyptian jewellery drawn from the originals in the British Museum — and examined, for once, as workmanship rather than as archaeology.

Curious Facts

Everything below is in the book — each one links straight to the page it comes from.

  1. The most famous specimen on the plate never existed. Earring No. 1 is not an actual object: Duthie reduced it from the colossal Assyrian bas-reliefs, where the same ornament appears so often that he took it as a common type. Every other specimen is in the British Museum. Read it in the book →
  2. Assyrian ring moulds were not sand, but clay — and you can still see the seam. Layard's Nineveh collection includes moulds of a chalky, clayey substance, cut in both halves with a pouring gate and air channels; small cast bells and weights still show the ridge the mould joint left. Read it in the book →
  3. Pliny may have written about borax under another name. Duthie notes scholars hold that Pliny speaks of borax — the jeweler's immemorial flux — as "chrysocolla," which lets him argue soldering could be far older than the surviving evidence. Read it in the book →
  4. The jeweler's blow-pipe of 1867 was still just a bent tube. For all the science of the modern chemist's instrument, the working jeweler's blow-pipe remained a piece of bent tubing, smaller at one end than the other — so simple that no date is too early for its invention. Read it in the book →
  5. Ancient earrings had no clasps. The earloops are simply the thinned ends of fine gold wire, passed through the ear and bent round — to remove the earring you straightened the wire. Bracelets often could not be removed at all without a jeweler. Read it in the book →
  6. A 3,600-year-old bracelet has a joint like a snuff-box. Queen Aah-hept's bracelet, made about 1800 B.C., has a joint of fifteen divisions technically called "knuckles" — seven fitting into eight, in Duthie's words like a well-made modern snuff-box. Read it in the book →
  7. The Assyrians chased their gold over tar — and the East Indies still did. Earring No. 5 was filled with bituminous matter to resist the chasing tool, exactly the method behind the "loaded" jewelry still made in the East Indies when Duthie wrote. Read it in the book →
  8. The zigzag on the bracelet is running water. The inlay of lapis-lazuli and gold plates forms the zigzag the Egyptians used to represent running water — which is why Duthie drew the bracelet from the side rather than the front, to show the pattern whole. Read it in the book →
  9. None of it is enamel. Dr. Birch is quoted flatly: the encrusted blue and red is opaque glass set as a kind of cloisonné, "not enamelled" — because enamelling was not known before the Roman Empire. Read it in the book →
  10. The modern wire draw-plate wears a sapphire. Even the finest steel draw-plates wear out quickly, so by 1867 the improvement was an eyelet of sapphire or similar hard gem set where the hole is made — proof of how demanding a process the ancients somehow mastered. Read it in the book →
Rights & ReuseThe complete text of Ancient Jewelry (1867) is in the public domain in the United States — like all works published before 1928 — and is free to read, download, quote, teach from, and reuse. This digital edition (its transcription, restored images, and site design) is © 2026 PhotoOpAI, and any editorial commentary we add is clearly marked as ours; the underlying public-domain text carries no such restriction.