Three Luristan Copper & Bronze Bangles or Torques

Near East, Persia, Luristan. A trio of personal ornaments from the highland workshops of Luristan, each drawn from a single rod and bent into an open ring. The largest is a bronze bangle of heavy D-section, tapering to blunt terminals that stop just short of meeting. The smaller, more petite example is copper, its band thickened at the midpoint and worn smooth by handling. The thinnest, of bronze, is a wide penannular hoop with one end hooked, likely worn at the throat as a torque or gorget rather than at the wrist. All three carry a mottled green and earthen patina raised over long burial. Metal ornaments of this kind were made in quantity across the Zagros valleys, serving simultaneously as adornment, portable wealth, and grave furnishing. Luristan, the mountainous belt of the central Zagros, produced one of the ancient world's most prolific metalworking traditions between roughly the twelfth and seventh centuries BCE. Its cemeteries yielded horse fittings, pins, standards, and vessels alongside vast numbers of open bracelets and neck rings like these. Because the population that made them was substantially pastoral and seasonally mobile, wealth was carried on the body rather than stored in architecture: a bangle was ornament, currency, and status marker at once, and the same objects followed their owners into the grave. The penannular form, split rather than closed, allowed a single size to be sprung open and adjusted to the wearer, which is why so few Luristan hoops show any fastening mechanism at all. Item # 204609

Estimate:£301.42

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