How I Began the Collection of Ethnic Ornaments

It began when my family moved to Turkey because my husband had been recruited by the U. S. Foreign Service (our Embassies and Aid Programs) as an auditor of the U. S. Agency for International Development in the Middle East. We lived four years in Ankara, and when we left we had a house full of everything from carpets to Anatolian Shepherd Dogs. But the dogs, the copper pots and pans and the wheat grinding sleds I will leave out of my discussion. I will stick to jewelry, textiles and home furnishing accessories such as artifacts for display.

Within a few months, our Ankara flat's hardwood parquet was covered with magnificent carpets. The dollar seemed to go farther in those days, 1969-73. I was still a fairly young householder and I wanted copper vases, ceramic plates, and more and more carpets. I had not had such beautiful handmade things available to me before that time in my life. My husband traveled to Iran, to Egypt and to Greece, bringing back everything from cut crystal imported to Cyprus from Czechoslovakia to marble statues surplused from the museum in Cairo. It took me a while to become interested in ethnic jewels. Those wool carpets were my collecting passion for those four years.

But then we took the overland route to Afghanistan, our next post. In our Land Rover with our youngest son lying on all the necessary supplies in the back, we drove for about a week through Eastern Turkey and Iran, and all along the desert road through Herat and Kandahar to Kabul. We settled into a lovely home made of mud brick with smoothed painted mud floors. They were easy to repair because after several earthquakes the mud mason shows up with a bucket of mud and fills in the crack and paints in over. Earthquakes are fairly common in Kabul, because it sits in the lower reaches of the Himalayas, in the Hindu Kush Mountains. Since that mountain range is still rising, the earth stretches and yawns fairly often.

Bactrian Amulets, Carved Alabaster Miniatures 4500 Years Old

For photos, descriptions, prices, shipping policies and Certificates of Authenticity 

CONTACT ME through the private message form above right. 

It was in Kabul that bodily ornamentation became interesting to me. Since pre-historic times, the people have mined gemstones and finished them into ornaments and utensils. I have in my collection many various household, cosmetic and jewelry pieces made of stone around 4500 years ago. By that time, the trade route through Afghanistan was a heavily traveled road. From that period to about the time of Alexander the Great's marriage to Roxanne in the Bactria Kingdom (not far from Kabul) was really the high period for civilization in that region. The glories of the past in Afghanistan provided our most interesting collectibles.

We could have stayed in Afghanistan for a long while, because it fed our interest in the development of art and technology through the ages.

For photos, descriptions, prices, shipping policies and Certificates of Authenticity 

CONTACT ME through the private message form above right.