Sterling Silver Indian Jewelry
The flow of gold and silver into India is unintermittant. The total net imports of these metals, that is, deductions made of the quantities again exported, during the last six years amounted to £63,5 million, the proportion of gold to silver being as three to five.... This silver is mostly all coined into rupees at the mints, though it does not then all remain in currency, for the silversmith in India works up rupees very largely into ornaments". During the financial year 1884-85 Indian imports included236,201 tonnes of metals (including, gold and silver). The fact that India's own production of silver, from its own sources, during the year 1999-2000 amounted to a mearge 53 tonnes, shows that India's thousands of tonnes of silver stocks have come here from abroad through trade conducted over at least 2500 years.
Establishing the chronology of Indian silver ornaments and objects has always been problematic firstly because of the age-old custom of melting old ornaments to make new ones for every next generation or two, leading to the extinction of stylistic certitude of every epoch and corollary of stylistic development. More-over, in India there was hardly ever any custom of stamping silver, monitoring percentage of alloys or its date. Due to these reasons, all attempts to date silver objects rest on somewhat shaky grounds; stratigraphical context or comparative stylistic similarities between motifs rendered in different art forms of a given period being the only other parameters available for dating. Graeco-Roman, Persian or Central Asian elements have contributed immensely to the development of styles of making ornaments and objects which combined with dated coins of certain dynasties or periods have offered a somewhat firm basis for dating.
Great !
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000MAWLJG
Posted by: Meenakshi | September 25, 2008 at 01:34 AM