Necklace Bead and Pair of Pendants in the Shape of an Auspicious Symbol (c. 150 BCE): Art, History and Details

Necklace Bead and Pair of Pendants in the Shape of an Auspicious Symbol (c. 150 BCE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

These exceptionally fine pieces of gold jewelry would have been strung on a necklace. The auspicious symbols on either side of the egg-shaped bead are in the form of full blown lotus flowers with the seed pods carefully detailed, and trident-shaped forms decorated with stylized palmette motifs emanate down from the lotuses.

Object facts

• Title: Necklace Bead and Pair of Pendants in the Shape of an Auspicious Symbol
• Date: c. 150 BCE
• Culture: India, Uttar Pradesh or Madhya Pradesh, Shunga period (185–78 BCE)
• Type: Jewelry
• Technique: gold
• Collection: Indian Art - Sunga
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1973.66

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• "The Year in Review for 1973." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 61, no. 2 (1974): 31-78.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1978. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1991.

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.