How Has Heart Jewelry Developed Over The History of Man?

We thank you for all the kind response regarding the heart jewelry articles that we have written in the past. It's very heart-warming. Today we would like to go back in time a bit further and write a more "generic" history of jewelry in general. The art form that we know of as "Jewelry Making" as been around for thousands of years, and different cultures have incorporated it in different ways. If we examine their pieces of jewelry we will gain some insight into the inner working of these ancient cultures.

The homo sapiens that lived in Africa provide us with the first sign of a culture using jewelry. They have found snail shell beads at Blombos Cave (situated in the side of a limestone cliff in South Africa) that date back to over 75,000 years ago. If we go to the other side of Africa, at Enkapune Ya Moto in Kenya, they have found beads made from ostrich egg shells that date back to over 40,000 years ago.

Egypt is known for the Great Pyramids and the Ancient Sphinx, but it has created some remarkable jewelry as well. In fact, we see the first signs of established jewelry making starting to appear here around 3,000 to 5,000 years ago. The Egyptians used many of the materials that we use to make jewelry today, such as gemstones, but glass was their preferred medium. With glass they could color it to satisfy their various tastes and needs. In fact, for every gemstone that they could find in nature, they were able to make a glass replicate of it. As time passed on, other cultures, such as the Ancient Phoenicians, used Egyptian jewelry as a template for their own unique designs.

We all love colored jewelry for it's beauty, but to the Ancient Egyptians it meant different things. Take for example the color red. The necklace of Isis that was to be placed on the neck of a mummy needed to be red in color. It was thought that this color would satisfy Isis's need for blood. On the other side of the coin, the color green was used to symbolize growth in crops and fertility. The Ancient Egyptians made their jewelry in large workshops that were often attached to their palaces and temples.

Around 4000 years ago we see jewelry development and production starting to spring up in the cities of Sumer and Akkad in Ancient Mesopotamia. This jewelry tended to be made from metal leaf, and was often set in a large number of brightly-colored stones, such as lapis, jasper, agate, and carnelian. They also incorporated various shapes, such as grapes, leafs, cones and spirals into their designs. Since the Ancient Mesopotamians were also masters in the area of record keeping, huge archives of detailed records relating to the creation and trading of jewelry have been unearthed in various archaeological sites.

We hope you have enjoyed this little departure from our regular heart jewelry articles. It's very interesting to see how this art form of jewelry making has developed over the years.

If you want to find out more about very beautiful heart jewelry or heart jewelry that is open, then visit Betsy Johnson's blogs.