A Sumerian Carnelian Bead Necklace,
Early Bronze Age, ca. 2600 - 2100 BCE

featuring a beautiful barrel-shaped carnelian bead, of exceptional quality strung as a pendant with a modern adjustable 18-inch gold chain.  Beads, similar to this example, was found in graves at the Sumerian city of Ur, Southern Iraq in excavations carried out by the archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley in 1934.

For related examples see:  Zettler, Richard L., Lee Horne, Donald P. Hansen, and Holly Pittman, Treasures from the Royal Tombs of Ur, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 1998.

Dimensions:  Bead Length: 7/8 inch (2.2 cm)

Condition:  The bead is intact and in excellent condition overall, it has been restrung on a modern adjustable 18-inch chain of 18K gold.

Provenance:  Private collection of Lady Gloria Dale (1922 - 2013 ), Lady Gloria Dale, artist, British crafts patron, and wife of the late Sir William Dale, died December 18th in a hospice in Hampstead, London. She was 91. She and Sir William, a leading British Commonwealth lawyer and instructor in legislative drafting and international law, married in 1966. Lady Dale, who resided in Lincoln"s Inn for the past 20 years, began a crafts career in her late 20s in Washington DC where she first made award-winning, artist-designed hand-tufted rugs that were exhibited in America (including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City), Italy and England during the 1960s. After she and Sir William returned to London from eight years of living in Beirut Lebanon in the early 1970s, she began to design jewelry using antique beads she collected throughout the Middle East. She later donated a collection of those antique beads to the British Museum.