Three Coral centre-beads, necklace with old handcut glass. The three gem-quality orange Corals are old Tibetan Corals, probably Mediterranean in origin, handcut around the mid-1900s. The weight of the three plus the sixteen smaller Corals in the necklace, is just over 4grams total. The smaller handcut old Corals are from Sth India, definitely of Mediterranean origin, also dating back into the mid 1900s.
Gem-quality Coral has had a market in Tibet since antiquity; traders brought it up through China from its source in the China Sea, in the waters off the island of Formosa. When Tibet was opened to European trade in the early 1800s, gem-quality Coral from the Mediterranean Sea was introduced.
Four types of old hand-blown glass beads have been used in this necklace: the red beads and the small dark blues are old tribal Nagaland, from multi-strand glass bead ropes of the mid-1900s; the luminous rounded blue glass is very old, from Java and dating back hundreds of years; the pale blue glass is truly ancient, Roman, cut from shards of Roman glasswear sourced in the Southern Levant.