In the development of the jewelers' art, Phoenicia played a similar part to Etruria, in deed the latter country was in many instances directly dependent upon the former. Little originality is to be noted in Phoenician work, but the Phoenicians, as the great trading-folk of the time between 1000 or 1200 B.C., and about 500 a.c., or earlier, when the Greeks first challenged their supremacy and then supplanted them, had been active carriers of foreign jewelry from land to land, besides producing a considerable quantity of their own workmanship based on foreign models. This was of course supplemented by the inland trade between the Greek colonies of Asia Minor and the Asiatic and Egyptian sources to the southward and eastward.
Etruscan jewelry was mainly of eclectic types combining, or copying, models of Egyp tian or Assyrian origin, transmitted in a modi fied form by the Phcenicians and by the early Greeks. It was evidently through the Etruscans that the art was brought to the Romans. How ever, in spite of the fact that the Etruscans were essentially copyists, they evolved many beautiful decorative designs and so successfully developed their originals as to produce a clearly marked national jewelry.
Probably the earliest Greek jewels of elabo rate workmanship are those unearthed by Schliemann at Mycenz in 1876-88, and those brought to light by him a few years earlier in the Troad. Whatever we may think of his attribution of many of them to Homeric per sonages, there can be no doubt that they belong to the peoples and the localities celebrated in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and represent at its best the Greek art in jewelry of from 1600 to 1400 a.c., and a few centuries later. The so-called Minoan gems, specifically those of Crete, and by extension those of other 2Egean islands (hence sometimes called °Island gems"), are less impressive, though they are of slightly earlier date, as are also those from Ilysus on the island of Rhodes. The latter jewels, now in the British Museum, comprise necklaces of irregularly-cut beads of amber, amethyst, agate or rock crystals, very rarely polished, and of polished carnelian beads. There are also many small bead-pendants of porcelain, some of them glazed.
The finest jewel found by Dr. Schliemann at Mycenm is a gold brooch, having an elaborate centre boss of gold and silver plates worked into the form of a full-blown flower. Here were also unearthed several small earrings set with amethyst, as well as objects having inlays and beads of glass, amethyst or carnelian. In taglio gems with gold settings were also found. Besides some curious earrings the Troad fur nished plaques made of gold wire fashioned into a kind of basket-work, and provided with a hook for attachment to the lobe of the ear; from the plaque depended little golden chains, on which in many cases small gold leaves were soldered as ornaments.
The best Greek jewelry dates from the 5th century before Christ, when Greek art of all kinds stood at the very highest point, and this branch of art continued to flourish among the Greeks for many centuries. The goldsmiths used their precious metals in a manner showing their appreciation of the fact that any material, however precious, was subordinate in the art ist's mind to the design and workmanship that gave it life and grace. Of all forms of orna mentation, delicate filigree work was most highly favored, and for color, which was spar ingly employed, reliance was rather placed upon enameling than upon precious stones. The designs were preferably of fruit or flower themes, or else of the more graceful of the animal forms. Virtually all the beau tiful types of jewelry that had so far been evolved in the world known to them were laid under contribution by the Greek jewelers, and elaborated by them. But although splendid crowns, diadems, necklaces, bracelets, armlets, funeral wreaths, pins and rings were made, the greatest variety of design is perhaps ex hibited in the wealth of earrings that still exist, although so many must have been de stroyed or lost. So potent was the tendency
to create beautiful forms and to enrich• the decoration, that the size of the earrings was progressively increased, so that some of them greatly exceed the normal dimensions of this jewel, and must have been worn suspended from a bandeau, or some such support, bound on the head, as they are much too heavy to be sustained by the ear.
A most extraordinary assemblage of jewels belonging to the Persian period of the latter part of the 4th century s.c., was uncovered by M. Henry de Morgan near Susa, on 10 Feb. 1901, when he brought to light from six meters below the surface a bronze sarcophagus con taining the skeleton of a woman. Heaped upon the breast of the skeleton, and strewn about the head and neck, was a mass of finely-wrought and artistic jewels, comprising: a gold torque weighing nearly a pound troy, decorated with lion's heads, the gold inlaid with turquoise and lapis-lazuli; bracelets of like design; several long and valuable stone-set necklaces, and a three-row pearl necklace, originally consisting of from 400 to 500 pearls, of which 238 were still in a fair state of preservation after a lapse of more than 22 centuries. The stones in the other necklaces comprised turquoise, lapis-lazuli, emerald, agate, various jaspers, red and blond carnelian, feldspar, jade (?), hyaline and milky quartz, amethyst of a pale violet hue, hematite, several marbles and breccia.* The Scytho-Greek art of which so many examples have been found in the tumuli of the Crimea, more especially in those about Kertch, the ancient Panticapmum, settled by Greeks from Miletus in the 6th century n.c., represents in many of its specimens a Proto Russian art. Others again are purely Greek and the rest are either the work of Greek artists or were executed by those whom they had instructed. The finest specimens were gathered together in the Kertch Museum at the Hermitage in Petrograd. The largest and rich est of these tumuli is that known as Koul-Oba (Tartar for "ash-heap"), situated about four miles west of Kertch, and which when first excavated in 1831 had escaped the plundering to which so many other of the grave-mounds had been subjected. A great variety of jewels was found in this tomb, which must have been that of one of the richest kings of the region, and it has been approximately dated at about 300 a.c., at which time there flourished a Bos porian king named Pairisades. Within the tomb were found the moldering remains of a king, his queen, his servants and his horses, and upon the royal person, as well as around it, were the royal treasures. On the king's neck was a massive gold torque, the ends terminating iu figures of Scythians on horseback, partly in green and blue enamel. Encircling his wrists and arms were penannular bracelets and arm lets, wrought most beautifully of a massive cable of gold, the ends figuring sphinxes. Adorning the head of a woman, evidently be longing to the royal house, and who had been sepultured near-by, was a mitre-shaped diadem similar to that worn by the king; a gold torque with lion-forms at its ends was around her neck, and also a magnificent necklace in filigree work with medaillions in repousse, and bearing many exquisitely delicate chainlets, on which hung as pendants a number of vase-shaped ornaments and others in granulated work re sembling those met with in some of the finest Etruscan necklaces. Unfortunately, although this splendid sepulture had remained undis turbed for more than 20 centuries, it was care lessly guarded after it was opened, and golden ornaments to the weight of 120 pounds were stolen by the neighboring peasants, only about 15 pounds' weight of them being eventually recovered by the authorities.