Old Silver & Venetian Glass. The old Silver beads, centre bead Turkmeni and the two outside beads Afghani, totally handmade, date from around the mid-1900s; the two old glass beads, coloured on a black core, are over a half-century older, hand-blown on an island in the Venice Lagoon in the late 1800s. Countless numbers of such glass beads were created in Venetian work shops specifically for the bartering trade that flourished in the 1800s between European and African traders. These glass beads were traded into all parts of the African continent.
So many of these beads found their way into Saharan Mali, into Timbuktu, a major trading entrepot between the south and north of the continent, that the beads are sometimes called “Mali Beads”.
The slim Silver cable chain is new; it is, by its nature, not flexible, and has the virtue of always sitting round on the neck, a look of its own.