Gold Necklace Research Articles

In Search of the Midas Touch: Gold, Güiriseros and Globalization in Nicaragua

Boccardi Capital Brings Touch of Gold Las VegasLAS VEGAS, Feb. 12 /PRNewswire/ -Boccardi Capital announced today the beginnings of their muchvaunted branding concept, KING MIDAS WORLD. New partners have come on board for this development that promises to change Las Vegas forever. More than just an innovative way to play with money in Las Vegas and elsewhere, the KING MIDAS WORLD concept introduces an all surrounding lifestyle. Based on the ancient legend of KING MIDAS (The Midas Touch) who turned to gold everything he touched, KING MIDAS WORLD will empower people in much the same way. With the pieces in place, Boccardi is set to deliver to Las Vegas a revolutionary new dimension to the gaming industry, opening new doors of revenue and entertainment.1Random Images:Snapshot 1: A marriage is taking place in Coimbatore, South India. The 800 or so guests stare with interest at the groom and bride seated in the middle of the large wedding hall. The groom looks mightily uncomfortable in a silk dhoti that is embroidered with real gold patterns. The bride sweats through a 9-yard silk sari that is also woven with gold. The temperature in the room is about 100° F. The wedding is solemnized by exchanging gold necklaces, each weighing about 15-20 ounces. Although they do not believe in dowry, the bride's family hands over a vast array of gifts to the groom's family. Prominent among these, as noted by everyone present, are gold coins, biscuits and jewelry.Snapshot 2: A small sailboat has left the coast of the United Arab Emirates. In addition to fish, it carries 200 pounds of gold bars. The boat will make landfall somewhere on the West Coast of India. Prom there, the contraband will make its way into the precious metals market in Bombay.Snapshot 3: The hole was bigger. What was once a mountain covered with tropical hardwood trees was now a gaping dust-ridden crater five kilometres wide. The company's workers labour in their caterpillars and trucks far below, 400 feet below ground level. Gold-bearing ores are brought up to the processing plant where they are added to the large mounds placed on sheets of black plastic over which a pipe sprays a cyanide-based solution. The Indonesian soldier, machine-gun in hand, looks on as the helicopter takes off with gold ingots. A similar scene is being played out simultaneously in the Philippines, Ecuador, and Nevada, U.S.A.Snapshot 4: June 1999. San Juan Ridge, California. Eighty-five activists from 21 countries meet for a week to discuss the global implications of gold mining. Environmentalists, feminists, indigenous rights activists, scientists, small miners, and mine workers discuss and debate against the backdrop of mountains and streams that were decisively transformed by the California Gold Rush of 1849. Although no consensus is achieved, everyone agrees that large-scale gold mining should be immediately banned.The stuff of fantasies, dreams and nightmares, gold continues to circulate in peoples' lives around the world. Loved and worshipped by billions, hated, increasingly, by millions, it is a commodity with few equals. Despite the much-vaunted world of high technology, Internet finance, virtual money, or hedge funds, gold continues to play an important economic role in the present context. Although no longer viewed as a counterpart to money in the West, gold nonetheless retains that role in large parts of the developing world. Its global presence signifies past and present linkages that provide a useful window into the nature and shape of contemporary globalization.Gold is a rather peculiar commodity. At an abstract level, it is a commodity like any other that is produced under conditions of capitalist production. Similar to oranges, shoes or wine, it has use value, exchange value, and value. Gold does not have any special abstract qualities that mark it as an unusual commodity. It is traded in formal and informal markets from stock exchanges to pawn shops and street corners. …

Precious metals assay by means of microbeam XRF technology

There have been increasing demands for a means whereby the transactors and dealers in jewelry can accurately and efficiently appraise the precious metal contents on the premises. These values of such articles cannot be obtained accurately or nondestructively by conventional methods, such as specific gravity measurement, touchstone method, fire assay method, atomic absorption spectrometry and the like. A new method of microbeam X-ray fluorescence analysis (Microbeam XRF) has been developed to analyze the type and quantity of precious metal elements. In this method a beam of X-ray generated from a low powered X-ray tube is collimated by a collimator with a diameter of 0.1–5 mm. An object to be analyzed is positioned by moving a three-dimensional sample stage till the sample can be observed clearly with optical microscope. The X-ray beam will coincide with the viewing point on the surface of the sample. The X-rays produced are detected in a high efficient proportional detector. Its spectrum, whose scattering background is lower than that with the broad beam method, is recorded and analyzed by a multichannel analyzer. The intensities of selected peaks corresponding to target elements are then determined and the relative compositions of the elements are also calculated by a fundamental parametric method. Two sets of standards (No. SYS-01) were measured by the instrument. It showed that the precision of gold measurement was 0.1% and the correlative coefficient between the measurement results and the given values of the standards was better than 99.998%. A piece of gold necklace was also checked step by step. The microbeam XRF is a reliable and accurate method for precious metals jewelry assay.

The Archaeological and Literary Evidence for the Burning of the Persepolis Palace

Recent excavations in Macedonia have provided an analogy to the pillaging of the Palace at Persepolis. In plundered tombs at Aiani the excavators found a number of small gold discs with impressed rosettes and of gilded silver ivy leaves; at Katerini some thirty-five gold discs with impressed rosettes, a gold double pin, a gold ring from a sword-hilt, a bit of a gilded pectoral, gilded silver fittings once attached to a leather cuirass, many buttons and other fragments; and at Palatitsia (near Vergina) bits of a gilded bronze wreath and of a gold necklace, and an ivory fitting. It was suggested that some of these objects had been dropped when ornamental facings were being torn away from a wooden funerary couch and from clothing by the robbers, who were probably working at speed and dared not return. In the antechamber of the tomb at Katerini many of the objects I have mentioned were found inside a burnt layer, and M. Andronikos has provided the explanation that they had been burnt on the pyre outside the tomb and then brought inside with the debris of the pyre itself. Nothing else was associated with burnt material.

Allergic Contact Dermatitis to Gold

To the Editor.— Gold is an inert metal, rarely implicated as a contact allergen. Although allergic contact dermatitis (ACD) to gold is much less common than ACD to nickel or cobalt, it must be considered in certain cases, especially in jewelry dermatitis. The following case reports of two patients seen less than six months apart illustrate the clinical features and necessary investigations of ACD to gold. Report of Cases.—Case 1.— A 34-year-old woman had a four-year history of eczema occurring primarily in areas of metal contact. The most severely affected areas were the earlobes. She had worn pierced earrings for many years, but once her dermatitis began she was unable to wear even "expensive" 14-carat gold. She was also unable to wear gold necklaces or her wedding ring. Examination revealed chronic eczema on the left ring finger and lower earlobes. Patch testing was performed and read at

Lollianos and the desperadoes

‘Without exaggeration and oversimplification little progress is made in most fields of humanistic investigation.’ With this disarming quotation from A. D. Nock, Albert Henrichs begins his book-length interpretation of P. Colon, inv. 3328. In the same spirit of humanistic progress, I would like to reconsider some aspects of the text and to offer a different assessment of its place in the history of religion and literature.The fragments are from three pages of a hitherto unknown Greek novel, Lollianos'Phoinikika. Frags A and B luckily include book-ends, from whose subscriptions we know the author and title of the work. Frag. C is just scraps which yield no continuous sense. Frag. A brokenly and confusedly mentions youths, women dancing, (furniture?) being thrown off the roof, sobriety, kissing, and then, in a slightly more intelligible scene, the male narrator's loss of virginity with a woman named Persis, her gift to him of a gold necklace which he refuses, the assistance of one Glauketes in taking the necklace elsewhere, and finally what seems to be a confrontation between Persis' mother and the two lovers. This last is similar to Achilles Tatius ii 23–5. Achilles Tatius also offers the closest parallel to frag. B, a ghastly description of human sacrifice and cannibalism. This scene is the focus of most of Henrichs' interpretation and I will limit myself to it in the present article.The central question raised by this new novel fragment is how to assess the relative importance of religious and literary parallels. Is thePhoinikikato be regarded as a document in religious or in literary history, or perhaps somewhere on the borderland of both? There has been a lively discussion in the last half century of the thesis that the ancient novels were written and read as religious documents, deriving their basic structure and many details from the myths and cults of particular religions. Henrichs devotes most of his book to arguing that the sacrifice scene in Lollianos is inspired by an actual rite, probably of a Dionysian character, and that thePhoinikikaserves to illuminate a little-known corner of religious history. His views are based on an extensive collection of liturgical, mythical and ethnological parallels concerning oath rituals, the sacrifice of children, cannibalism, and face-painting. Of all the parallels cited, the two which are closest in every way to Lollianos are Achilles Tatius iii 15 and Cassius Dio lxxi 4. On the strength of these Henrichs asserts that Lollianos' description of a ritual murder represents, more or less directly, the cultic practice of the Egyptian Boukoloi. Without postulating a religious message for thePhoinikikaas a whole, Henrichs does claim that this scene yields valuable information about the structure of ancient mystery rituals (78 n. 6) and that these new fragments support the methodological correctness of Kerenyi's and Merkelbach's approach to the ancient novels.

Black and Part-Black Populations in Colonial Costa Rica: Ethnohistorical Resources and Problems

Unlike many other Latin American countries, Costa Rica imported few African slaves during the colonial period. Nevertheless, a variety of adaptations resulted creating at least four identifiable populations. The available colonial resources are described, the nature of the organization of the cacao plantations are examined, and the problems of the colonial terminology are analyzed. This article presents an overview of the present state of knowledge about Black and part-Black populations of colonial Costa Rica, an area of Latin America in which African slaves played only a minor role. After briefly reviewing the development of colonial Costa Rica, the major sources of information on the colonial populations are described. The second section discusses the Black and part-Black populations of this time period. The final section discusses some of the advantages of conducting ethnohistorical research on colonial and early Republican Period Blacks and part-Blacks in Costa Rica and some of the problems that such research encounters. Development of Colonial Costa Rica In 1502 Columbus landed on the eastern coast of Costa Rica at Cariay (also called Carian), the present-day site of Puerto Lim6n, to repair his ships. Columbus and his men encountered Amerinds (probably the Huetar) wearing gold necklaces and breastplates. Very shortly thereafter exploration was begun in Costa Rica by the Spanish with the primary objective of discovering the mines that produced the gold of these native ornaments. The rich gold deposits that the Spanish had hoped to find in Costa Rica never materialized. At least some of the gold pieces had been of Panamanian or Colombian origin. Costa Rica was gradually settled by Spanish farm families. The interior Central Plateau (the Meseta Central) was the area favored for colonization by the Whites. Today the Central Plateau remains by far the most densely populated region of the country. A secondary area of White settlement was established on the Pacific coast. ETHNOHISTORY 27/1 (Winter 1980) 13 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.70 on Tue, 06 Sep 2016 06:07:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

The symbolism and function of the Window of Appearance in the Amarna Period

During the reign of the Amarna spouses, giving gold necklaces to royal officials took place (almost always) from the so-called Window of Appearance. From them, Akhenaten and Nefertiti, often with princesses, honoured deserved and devoted dignitaries. The popularity of the Window of Appearance closely relates to the introduction of a new religious system introduced by Akhenaten and Nefertiti. According to the new religion, Akhenaten and Nefertiti were a pair of divine twins like Shu and Tefnut, who in the Heliopolitan theology, were the children of the god Atum – replaced by Aten in Amarna. The royal couple prayed to the main solar god, while their subjects prayed to the king and queen. Since Akhenaten performed the role of a priest through whom ordinary people could pray to the god, it was necessary to createa construction that would allow the king to meet with his subjects publicly. The Window of Appearance was such architectural innovation. It was crucial because the king was an intermediator between the people and the only right sun god, Aten. The Windows of Appearance were probably located in various places in Akhetaten, including the Great Palace, the King’s House, the North Palace, the Small Aten Temple and in the temples of the Sunshades of Re in the Kom el-Nana and Maru-Aten. The characteristic shape of the Window of Appearance often appears in the architecture and the art of the Amarna Period. The structure resembles the Axt hieroglyph, which is the morning sun rising between two hills. This symbol is a part of the name of the new capital Axt-itn – The Horizon of Aten.

Mummification in Egypt

AN interesting discovery, which it is thought may prove of considerable importance for the history of mummification in Egypt, is reported from Cairo. In a tomb near one of the pyramids opened by Prof. Selim Hassan, of the University of Cairo, has been found the body of a pregnant woman completely wrapped in bandages. She was the wife of Sechem Nefer, governor of a province under Chefren, the king of the Fourth Dynasty (2650 B.C.), who built the second pyramid at Gizeh. This, it is stated by the Cairo correspondent of The Times in the issue of April 21, is believed to be the oldest mummy known. In another tomb, that of Knum Baef, a son of Chefren, is a large white sarcophagus, not yet opened, upon which was found a gold necklace three feet long, with beading of carnelians, amethysts and turquoises, and ivory and gold finger sheaths. A third tomb was found to contain the mummy of a man completely wrapped in bandages with the exception of the head. The earliest date at which mummification was practised in Egypt is at present somewhat obscure. It is possible that even so far back as the First Dynasty some attempt was made to ensure preservation of the body; and in the Second Dynasty the corrosion of the linen bandages in which the bodies are wrapped has been thought to be due to a practice of smearing the corpse with natron. Similar effects have been observed in burials of the Third and Fourth Dynasties. The full process, involving removal of the internal organs of the body, appears in the Fifth Dynasty. Details of the process applied to the preservation of the body of the wife of Sechem Nefer consequently will be of the greatest interest.