Sri Lankan Necklace of Gilded-Silver Beads

This fine and wearable necklace of gilded silver beads is from Sri Lanka. It comprises a series of well-matched, alternating beads based on a local fruit with striations, followed by open-work, trellis-style beads decorated with fine applied granulation work. These are then separated by smaller faceted spacer beads.

The necklace opens and closes with a hook and loop closure.

The beads date to the 19th century but are based on much earlier types that date back to the Pyu culture – Pyu was a group of city-states that existed from around 200BC to 1100AD in the area that is now present-day Upper Burma (Myanmar).

Pyu culture was heavily influenced by trade with India. Buddhism was imported along with other cultural and political ideas. Pyu civilisation largely ended in the 9th century when the city-states were destroyed by repeated invasions from the Kingdom of Nanzhao. Pyu settlements remained in Upper Burma for the next three centuries but gradually these were absorbed into the expanding Pagan Kingdom, and ultimately, the Pyu assumed Burman ethnicity.

The trading nature of the Pyu means that Pyu gold beads have been found as far afield as Thailand, Vietnam and China. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2017 exhibition, ‘Age of Empires: Art of the Qin and Han Dynasties’, includes several beads that are related in form to those in this necklace, and which were excavated from Eastern Han tombs in Guangxi, China and which are ascribed to the first century BC to the second century AD. The Met argues that such beads might not have been made in Pyu but in the ancient city of Taxila in Central Asia, whilst noting that such beads are found at numerous ancient sites including in Burma. (See Sun, 2017, p. 197-97).

The beads here have a fine patina and the necklace is stable and wearable.