Finland Pearl Diamond Wedding Fashion Gold Jewelry 21

Finland Pearl Diamond Wedding Fashion Gold Jewelry.

By Aamir Mannan.

In fact, the oldest piece of pearl jewelry on record is from the Persian Gulf region; a  2,500-3,000 year-old pearl necklace, made up of a triple row of 216  fairly well preserved pearls either from the late Elamite civilization or the Archemenid period that followed, dating back approximately to the 9th to 6th-century B.C. discovered in 1901 by archaeologist J. Morgan, in Susa, the capital of Elam, that was situated in the southwest of modern day Iran, in the province of Khuzestan, inside a bronze sarcophagus, belonging to a mummified body. This pearl necklace is a prominent exhibit in the Persian Gallery of the Louvre Museum in Paris. 

This is a significant archaeological discovery that shows the knowledge of pearls and their appreciation was widespread among the ancient people of Iran. More archeological evidence of the widespread use of pearls in ancient Iran would have been eliminated, as pearls being organic gems would not have withstood long periods of burial extending for thousands of years, unless they were protected in the secluded environment of a sarcophagus. However, even in the relative safety of a sarcophagus some of the pearls were in an advanced state of deterioration and just crumbled on contact reducing the number of pearls from the original estimated 400 to 500  to a mere 216