orientalising necklace
Necklace made up of thirty-two gold beads, three of vitreous paste and one of steatite. It is the most outstanding piece from the Poble Nou cemetery and one of the most extraordinary examples of Phoenician-Punic jewellery from the Iberian Peninsula. The techniques used to decorate all the gold beads are filigree, embossing and granulation. It contains several amulets that were considered very powerful at the time. Gold symbolises the eternal and unchanging and was believed to ward off evil spells and ensure well-being by protecting its owner even in the afterlife. The centrepiece is the disc of the…
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Ostrich eggshell lid
This piece is an engraved and painted ostrich eggshell. It is clipped from one of the poles. It has a 2 cm diameter hole, displaced in relation to the center, surely to empty the content. It appeared as trousseau inside a rectangular chamber tomb in the Phoenician cemetery of Casetes. The…
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Decorated ostrich eggshell
This ostrich eggshell was part of a funeral trousseau in the Phoenician cemetery of Casetes. It appeared inside a rectangular chamber tomb, lined with fire-resistant clay. Ostriches were very frequent in the steppes and on the desert margins of the river valleys of Syria- Mesopotamia, Egypt and North Africa. Therefore,…
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Punic amulet
This Punic (Carthaginian) pendant, made of glass paste, appeared in a large pit used as a dump in 1st c. BC, excavated near the road that communicated the Iberian city of Alon (called Alonís by ancient greeks) with the valley of Alcoy. People who dug this pit destroyed some ancient…
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The Stele necklace
This medallion, which was found in a tomb of the Casetes cemetery (Villajoyosa), belongs to a necklace with five pieces of gold and one of blue glass, dated in late 7th -6th century B.C. It was considered a powerful amulet. It is a solid piece, stele-shaped (gravestone), and very few…
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