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Gold melon bead. (Courtesy of the Vedat Nedim Tör Museum, Istanbul)
Gold melon bead
The Lydians and their World
(2010)
Cat. 153
- Date
- Ca. 575-540 BC, Lydian
- Museum
- Manisa, Archaeological and Ethnographic Museum, 5268
- Museum Inventory No.
- 5268
- Sardis or Museum Inv. No.
- J61.001
- Material
- Gold
- Object Type
- Jewelry and Ornaments
- Site
- Sardis
- Sector
- Nec
- Trench
- Tomb 61.2
- Locus
- Tomb 61.2 Locus 1
- Description
- Spherical form perforated with central hole. Outer surface articulated with curving, melon-like segments, which terminate at the hole mouths. Granulation in single rows between segments and in double rings around hole mouths. Height 0.0095 m, weight 2.35 g.
- Comments
- From a schist-lined cist burial in the Great Necropolis of Sardis (Inderesi region; grave 61.2). Recovered from a glass workshop destroyed in the mid sixth century BC at Sardis (see Cahill, “The Persian Sack of Sardis”) were one complete and one fragmentary melon-shaped bead of colored glass, in which each segment (eight in the complete bead) had been individually made in a color that contrasted with those of adjacent segments (Cahill in Greenewalt et al. 1990, 153-154 and fig. 17). For other comparanda, see Greenewalt 1972, 135 n. 35.
- See Also
- Baughan, “Lydian Burial Customs”.
- Bibliography
- Greenewalt 1972, 125, 135 (with previous bibliography); Dedeoğlu 2003, 35, fig.
- Author
- CHG