JEWELS OF THE PEARLY QUEEN
After our recent visit to Highclere Castle and its superb Egyptology collection, we’re now preparing to travel back to Cleopatra’s palatial capital Alexandria on our ‘Hidden Treasures’ tour. So between such lavish venues, it seems timely to bring you a bejewelled blog of wonderful things by opening up a cabinet of gems, the seventh case within our ‘Cleopatra and the Queens of Egypt’ exhibition at Experience Barnsley Museum in which ancient bling from the British Museum sits alongside treasures from the Barnsley and Bolton collections (above).
And this superb collection of pearls, garnets, amethysts and gold is all presided over by an astonishing blue intaglio identified as Cleopatra herself (above). Made of glass, so most appropriate in Barnsley whose coat of arms features a glass blower, the intaglio’s significance went largely unnoticed until the landmark Cleopatra exhibition held in Rome, Chicago and at the British Museum in 2001. For as the museum’s then director announced, “in the Greek and Roman department, a remarkable gem the size of a little fingernail has provided the clinching evidence for the newly recognised Egyptian images of the last queen of Egypt” beyond the two existing sculpted heads acknowledged to be her, one of which (below) greets visitors to our exhibition.
With both the sculpted head (aka ‘the Berlin Bust’) and glass portrait showing Cleopatra’s hair fastened back in her trademark bun secured with hairpins and topped by the royal diadem of her dynasty, the intaglio (below left) also features not one but three protective uraeus cobras, the very emblems we chose as our exhibition ‘logo’ and traceable throughout the imagery of Egypt’s royal women and goddesses for almost 3,000 years.
And the intaglio image is certainly a powerful one. Combining the face of Egypt’s most iconic female pharaoh and living goddess, it was designed to be set into a ring of the kind often presented as gifts to courtiers. An emerald portrait of Cleopatra’s grandfather Ptolemy IX was given to visiting Roman general Lucullus by the pharaoh himself back in 86 BC, with a superb gold ring set with a red jasper portrait of Cleopatra’s husband Mark Antony (above right). Most likely the work of Athens-based engraver Gaius Avianius Evander whom Antony brought over to Alexandria c.40-30 BC, the ring displayed in another of our exhibition cases again from the British Museum.
Yet for us, their most important loan - selected as part of our celebration of this year’s ‘Festival of Archaeology’ https://www.instagram.com/p/DbVjcLnAk4F/ - is surely the superb gold hairpin c.200-100 BC topped with lotus leaves, goats’ heads, doves and twin pearls (below).
Presented to the museum in 1888 after its discovery within Aphrodite’s shrine in Paphos on Cyprus which was once part of Egypt’s empire, the island was also the legendary birthplace of Aphrodite, born from the same foaming seas as the pearls which formed her sacred jewels. Presumably placed in her shrine as a votive offering by Ptolemaic courtiers Eubola and husband Aratus, as named in Greek on the pin’s shaft, so too Aphrodite who the Greeks identified with Egypt’s goddess Hathor-Isis. And since Cleopatra claimed to be the ‘Living Isis’ and had famously dressed as Aphrodite to meet Mark Antony at nearby Tarsus, she wears these same pearl-topped hairpins in a posthumous portrait (below left) and on many of her coin portraits (below centre, with Cleopatra’s practical, sacred and indeed fatal use of hairpins see: https://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue42/6/5.cfm).
And by combining such portraits with the features of the aforementioned sculpted head, our New-York based colleague Michael Bengtsson created a superb image specifically for our Barnsley exhibition (above right) displayed directly opposite the hairpin itself. Michael’s reconstruction also follows the coin images in the way Cleopatra further enhanced her pearlized persona with a long pearl necklace, worn flapper-style around her throat, its extra length hanging down the front of her body recalling the way Aphrodite-Isis was sometimes shown dressed in little more than her necklaces and lengthy regalia crossed over her torso (below left). She also appears in golden neckwear and bejewelled chest coverings (below centre) attached by means of the same golden chains used to secure the ‘kekryphalos’ hairnets worn by elite Ptolemaic women, the central medallion from one such example from Egypt featuring the face of Aphrodite herself (below right, minus original chains).
Even the goddess’ sandals are shown as golden (above centre), and with pearls added to royal examples in a tradition of gem-encrusted footwear stretching back well over a thousand years by the time of Cleopatra, her own top-to-toe look as the ultimate ‘Pearly Queen’ was finished off with her most famous jewels: her enormous earrings. Made from the two largest pearls ‘in the whole of history’ said to have “come down to her through the hands of the Kings of the East”, each one was claimed to be worth a staggering ten million sesterces (100,000 gold aurei close to 1,764 pounds of gold). And certainly Cleopatra had worn them to great effect during her time with Julius Caesar in Rome 46-44 BC, where the wealthy matrons who copied her style were said to be discontented unless the value of several estates hung from each lobe.
As for the fate of history’s most famous earrings, one of the pearls would ultimately be placed in the temple Caesar built in Rome’s Forum as a shrine to his ‘ancestor’ goddess Venus, Aphrodite’s Roman equivalent, next to which he’d placed a golden statue of Cleopatra herself. As for her second huge pearl, Cleopatra later sacrificed this by dissolving it in a goblet of sour wine aka ‘vinum acer’ or vinegar, not only to win a bet to stage the world’s costliest banquet but creating the fizzing pearl-based aphrodisiac ‘magistery’ she drank down in Antony’s honour – and which we recreate in some of our Bolton Museum study days and discuss in our ‘Cleopatra the Great’ biography (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cleopatra-Great-Woman-Behind-Legend/dp/0060585587).
And to keep to this same wine-goddess-earring theme(!), our display case houses a spectacular pair of Ptolemaic-era gold earrings featuring tiny wine amphorae, whose gleaming cabochon garnets not only provide the red colour linked to goddess Isis but signifies the kind of wine stored within (above). Complete with the tiniest heart-shaped elements added at the top and bottom plus gold chains to hook over the top of each ear again recalling the gold body chains discussed above, these lavish ear ornaments are again on loan from the British Museum, while the two lengths of purple amethysts in the same display case are borrowed from Bolton’s own superb Egyptian collection.
With amethysts hugely popular in Egypt since c.1900 BC following their discovery in desert mines protected by goddess Hathor ‘Lady of Amethyst’, her additional title ‘the Golden One’ was also reflected in the gold and amethyst jewellery sets transforming their wearer into an aspect of the goddess herself. Clearly a belief not lost on Cleopatra who wore an amethyst on her finger and had one set into her gold wine goblet in the Greek belief that amethysts offset intoxication, the Egyptians regarded the same stone as emblematic of Hathor ‘Lady of Drunkenness’ whose divine powers could presumably prevent it too.
Certainly such gems held a plethora of hidden meanings in both their form and colour (see: https://www.immortalegypt.co.uk/post/when-jewellery-speaks). For amethysts are one of very few natural sources of the purple closely associated with royalty, which the Greeks and Romans themselves achieved at huge cost by extracting dye from Murex sea snails to convey their own message of elite authority.
And similarly emerald green. Forming yet another part of Cleopatra’s glittering treasury which the ancient sources describe as “her gold, silver, emeralds, pearls, ebony and ivory”, the vivid green emeralds first mined in Egypt by Cleopatra’s dynasty were intimately linked with resurrection, and the powers of green-faced Osiris and his Greek equivalent Dionysus.
As patron deity of Cleopatra’s royal house and both her father Ptolemy XII and husband Mark Antony hailed as ‘the New Dionysos’, snakes were one of the god’s sacred creatures. With tame snakes kept by his female acolytes including Queen Olympias, mother of Alexander the Great, Alexander’s founding of Egypt’s new coastal capital Alexandria was accompanied by the sudden appearance of snakes, immediately identified as the new city’s guardian spirits embodying Osiris and Isis.
Indeed, with Isis herself routinely shown with her own sacred serpents wrapped around her forearms (above right), this was replicated by Cleopatra and her contemporaries by means of snake bracelets, a form of wrist regalia encountered at the centre of our jewel-box display. Yet in this case taking us all the way from Cleopatra’s Egypt to the farmlands of Roman Yorkshire, our wonderful example (below) was discovered during opencast mining at Billingley near Barnsley. Having been made sometime between c.100-300 AD, its rich green patina really complements its sinuous form, made popular by Cleopatra as ‘Living Isis’ whose influence had clearly spread to every corner of the ancient world.
Jo will be following in Cleopatra’s footsteps with her ‘Hidden Treasures’ tour until 5th November https://www.theculturalexperience.com/tours/ancient-egypt-hidden-treasures-expert-led-archaeology-and-history-tour/
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