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Jewelry A Girls Best
Friend
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Jewelry
has been define in our culture as a personal ornament,
such as a necklace, ring, or bracelet, made from jewels,
precious metals or other substance.
The word
jewellery or jewelry is derived from the word jewel,
which was anglicised from the Old French "jouel" in
around the 13th century. It goes all the back to the
Latin word "jocale", meaning plaything. Jewelry is one
of the oldest forms of body adornment; recently found
100,000 year-old Nassarius shells that were made into
beads are thought to be the oldest known
jewelry.
In early times jewelry was
designed for more practical purposes, such as wealth
storage and pinning clothes together, but in recent
times it has been used almost exclusively for
decoration. The first pieces of jewelry were made from
natural materials, such as bone, animal teeth, shell,
wood, and carved stone. jewelry was often made for
people of high importance to show their status and, in
many cases, they were buried with it.
Most
cultures have at some point had a practice of keeping
large amounts of wealth stored in the form of jewelry.
Numerous cultures move wedding dowries in the form of
jewelry, or create it as a means to store or display
coins. Alternatively, jewelry has been used as a
currency or trade good; an example being the use of
slave beads.
At first, brooches and buckles
were used many times as purely functional items, but
evolved into decorative items as their functional
requirement diminished. Jewelry can also be symbolic of
group membership, as in the case of the Christian
crucifix or Jewish Star of David, or of status, or the
Western practice of married people wearing a wedding
ring.
By wearing of amulets and devotional medals
jewelry was suppose to provide protection or ward off
evil by some cultures; these may take the form of
symbols (such as the ankh), stones, plants, animals,
body parts (such as the Khamsa), or glyphs (such as
stylized versions of the Throne Verse in Islamic
art).
Although artistic display has clearly
been a function of jewelry from the very beginning, the
other roles described above tended to take primacy.
Today you will find are large assortment of jewelry
books on past, present, type, construction,
materials.
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Books on Jewelry
Egyptian Revival Jewelry & Design
Forties and Fifties
Popular Jewelry
Generations of Jewelry
Jewelry & Metalwork
in the Arts & Crafts Tradition
Sarah Coventry? and
Emmons? (Jewelry From)
Shamelessly, Jewelry
from Kenneth Jay Lane
United in Beauty
More Books
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