LOADED QUESTION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I am going to give you my take on what I consider the answer to this GRAND question to be.
Actual dates for these beads are not known so I won’t venture a guess right now.
By "older" I am typically referring to the manufacturing process that is the pinnacle of perfection regarding Kiffa/Murakad beads. For my explanations I will be using polychrome triangular as examples…. The lines are straight, crisp, solid, uniform, tiny, bold, and perfect, every detail is as good as it gets, etc.
The best way to see this is with a visual side by side display. I will in the near future do some more Kiffa postings to show what I am trying to explain.
The "older" more perfect beads seem like they were made by a master craftsman, individually designed and created in a painstaking process that must have taken hours or days for a single bead.
More knowledgeable bead researchers than I can explain the varied uses and conditions of wear for these beads but I believe they were not mass produced originally. Motives can be similar but you will be hard pressed to find any two identical (this of course does not apply to the simpler and plainer bracelet beads or the monochrome triangles etc.).
Newer in age, but not those we find being produced presently, are beads, that at a quick glance resemble the “older” beads. One must “get in tight” to examine the differences. The designs are still very pleasing to the eye and the colors are still “correct” (time constraints force this to be explained in the future). The lines are not as tight or crisp and they are much fatter than before. Some beads show a running or bleeding of one color into another, that, when viewed under magnification is just not a crisp as it should be.
Typically the shape can also be somewhat out of alignment. The lines tend to waver a bit. Someone who has never seen a great “older” Kiffa bead would assume these to be the “older” ones. These beads still fall under the heading of “real Kiffa/Murakad” bead and I don’t believe they were massed produced for the western market. In my opinion they are the “newer old” ones.
Now we go on to the “new” ones. These types are what we can expect to find in the marketplace today. The colors and craftsmanship are the first sign of new manufacture! Some lean towards a yellowish/orange color that is NOT correct by any stretch of the imagination. The beads look like blobs at times and the lines/designs are wavy, fat and bleeding all over! These are not the true Kiffa/Murakad beads true collectors love, they are “mass” produced for a western market. They have a place in collections for comparison or if one is inclined to study the evolution of these beads. I compare them to true Kiffas the same way I compare Star beads from India to Venetian Chevrons.
Please, these are some of my thoughts on this subject and not gospel, time won’t permit me to expand on this subject anymore right now and I speak much better with pictures anyway, which will come soon.
Thomas