Bead (700s): Art, History and Details

Bead (700s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

An enormous amount of beaded strings and necklaces were excavated from Silla tomb sites. Glass, largely produced in ancient Rome since the late first century CE, also reached the Korean peninsula via the Silk Road, the ancient global trade route. Yet this glass bead is highly likely to be soda glass produced in the Silla territory.

Object facts

• Title: Bead
• Date: 700s
• Culture: Korea, Unified Silla period (676-935)
• Type: Jewelry
• Technique: glass
• Dimensions: Diameter: 3.7 cm (1 7/16 in.)
• Collection: Korean Art
• Department: Korean Art
• Accession number: 1917.1055

A detail from the museum

Glass, largely produced in ancient Rome since the late first century CE, reached the Korean peninsula via the Silk Road, the ancient global trade route. This glass bead is very likely to be a local product inspired by the imported Roman glass products.

Collection credit

Gift of the John Huntington Art and Polytechnic Trust

Further reading listed by the museum

• Opulence : treasures of Korean traditional craft [금은 보화: 한국 전통 공예 의 미]. Seoul: Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art: 2013.
• Lee, Soyoung, and Denise Patry Leidy. Silla: Korea's Golden Kingdom. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013.
• Park, Junyoung. “Characteristic and Development Ancient Glass Beads in Korea [韓國 古代 琉璃구슬의 特徵과 展開樣相].” Journal of Central Institute of Cultural Heritage 19 (2016): 71-109.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.