A hollow-formed discoid plaque with later central cabochon emerald, lateral hinge fasteners, with antique articulated band formed as outer borders of three-strand chains connected by hollow bulbs.

PROVENANCE:
Property of a County Durham collector; acquired on the UK art market before 2006.

LITERATURE:
See Marshall, F.H. Catalogue of the Jewellery, Greek, Etruscan and Roman, in the Department of Antiquities, British Museum, London, 1911, plate LIX for similar.

FOOTNOTES:
Emeralds were among the gemstones known to the Ptolemaic Egyptians and later the Romans, who called them smaragdi. They were described by writers, such as Pliny the Elder in his Natural History. Although some emeralds would have come from India, early authors consistently referred to them as having come from the ancient emerald mines of Egypt, located near Sikait, about halfway between Luxor on the Nile River and Roman-era port city of Berenike on the Red Sea. Archaeological evidence suggests that these Egyptian mines may have been worked intermittently as early as 500 BC, although the main period of mining appears to have begun under the Romans about 30 BC. Early Roman writers often referred to this area as “Mons Smaragdus” (Emerald Mountain). Egypt was the major source of emeralds until they were discovered in greater abundance and better quality in the 1520s in present-day Colombia.

Emeralds were one of the most popular gemstones in the Roman Empire and they are often depicted on the Faiyum mummy portraits. There was no shortage of luxury items available for those Romans wishing to display their wealth and taste, and the principal centers for the production of jewellery were the old Hellenistic capitals of Alexandria and Antioch, and Rome. In the Republic, the wearing of jewellery had been limited to certain classes of people and there had been strict regulations concerning both the amount of jewellery a woman might wear on any one occasion, and also the amount that might be buried with the dead. In the Empire, these restrictions were lifted, and wearing jewellery became a fashionable way of displaying wealth. Men tended to restrict themselves to a signet ring, but women adorned themselves with a wide variety of rings, necklaces, earrings, bracelets and hair ornaments. Lollia Paulina, for example, wife of the emperor Caligula, is reported by Pliny the Elder to have appeared "at an ordinary betrothal banquet, covered with emeralds and pearls interlaced alternately and shining all over her head, hair, ears, neck, arms and fingers, the sum total amounting to the value of forty million sestertii"; to put this sum into perspective, the pay of one of Caligula's soldiers would have been around nine hundred sestertii per year.