Pair of Earrings or Hair Ringlets with Ram Head (400s BCE): Art, History and Details

Pair of Earrings or Hair Ringlets with Ram Head (400s BCE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The main spiral body of this ornament is made from a hollow tube, decorated in the center with a double palmette. Each end of the ornament is capped with a ram’s head above an elaborate collar. There are no join seams on the main tube, meaning it must have been cast as a spiral or otherwise as a tapered tube that was then bent into shape. Scholars believe that these helical pieces were used as earrings (perhaps with a separate attachment) or to hold hair in place.

Object facts

• Title: Pair of Earrings or Hair Ringlets with Ram Head
• Date: 400s BCE
• Culture: Greece, Hellenistic period
• Type: Jewelry
• Technique: gold
• Dimensions: Overall: 3.5 cm (1 3/8 in.)
• Collection: GR - Greek
• Department: Greek and Roman Art
• Accession number: 1968.102

A detail from the museum

Each of the ram heads was cast in two parts, as indicated by the visible seam down the middle of each head.

Collection credit

Norman O. Stone and Ella A. Stone Memorial Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• 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.