| Original Message: Re: Shinji's turtle and Islamic eyes |
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Hi Shinji, hi everyone, It's great to come back to the forum and find such a fascinating and unique bead. Really, polychrome glass animal-shaped beads are very, very rare in early South-east Asia (or anywhere else). I agree that this one seems to have been reworked from a broken bead, but while this kind of recycling is frequent in Africa it's much less common in SE Asia. The original could have been a Jatim, though this arrangement of green, yellow, red, white, blue is very unusual in Jatim canes. Green-yellow-red is common, and red-white-blue is also, but not the five together. (Not impossible, of course, because that's a really nice and rare Jatim with the same colours that you show along with the two turtles). However, these colours are found much more frequently in West Asian "Islamic" and probably Byzantine eye beads (there are several in Panini's book on Middle Eastern and Venetian Glass beads). Quite a lot of fragments of Islamic beads and canes have been found on the west coast of southern Thailand and Malaysia, and I would bet that there are other sites in southern Burma that haven't even been found yet. It could be that a broken bead was reworked in that area, or indeed that local beadmakers made it there. That seems more likely to me than southeast Java. But really, beads moved around so much in the ancient world that just about anything is possible. Shinji, I really like you facebook site (and wish I didn't have to go into facebook to see it!). There are some wonderful beads there, and I love the ceramics too. Cheers, Will All rights reserved by Bead Collector Network and its users |
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