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Comments
An excellent piece indeed. Very hard to find now, and a great example.
This was cover lot of the catalogue , had it for years on consignment no one cared. It's a beautiful piece and yes very hard to find.
very interesting to see similarities between bigger pendant of this necklace and the group of mysterious pendants often found in hadramaut, Yemen and called "kisra"!!
The link between Hadramaut and indonesia is very strong and right now there is a huge indonesian community in Java of yemeni descent (especially hadramaut), siblings of the traders and adventurers that used to roam the indian ocean!
Wether the indonesian pattern has migrated to Yemen with yemeni migrants or had this shape been originally imported from south Arabia to the indonesian archipelago with the islamic conversion is not clear to me and needs thourough researches!
But it seems that the yemeni ones are less refined and intricate compared to the indonesian ones which have also the advantage of being made of gold and not in silver....maybe a possible first key of understanding such similarities and a hasted conclusion of an indonesia jewel being imported by yemeni migrants back to yemen after becoming financially successful and wealthy!
Do you have images of the Yemen variety to share? i don't know that name or am familiar with it. i will look it up in Marjorie's book. You might be right. The necklace above is 19th c but perhaps depending on when the Yemeni's came, the influence would be there from Yemen taking a design tip and bringing it back. I would assume they moved in the 20th c or was it before? I didn't know this actually so thanks for the information .. I do love the cross cultural effects on design and think there is not enough of it spoken or written about .. mostly supposition from people like us!
This one was being offered years ago in paris among a huge selection of yemeni, omani ans saudi jewels!
Ransom's book depicts one page 168 with some comments on it the next page!
Travelers to hadramaut are familiar with very flashy and posh buildings and palaces constructed by migrants who made fortunes in south and south east asia and returned home, but the back and forth movement of this adventurers/traders/mercenaries...dates back to centuries and history even mentions indonesian sultanates such as that of Pontianak on Borneo being founded by a yemeni.....
Obviously they were highly respected as the importer of the new faith into the archipelago but also for the trade network around the indian ocean that made them rich and respectable.
Aceh being the first place in the country to adopt Islam, it is also the first place with contacts with arab merchants possibly before even the advent of islam!
So links here are quite old
Wow, how amazing is this. I have had many Aceh ones but never Yemen ones. Yes i see the amazing similarity which is too close to be coincidental. i have not read her book through yet and will have to soon, as I am to write several reviews.
What an interesting discussion, and I I'll add a bit to it. If approached from an Indonesian view, it does not seem necessary to assume a Yemen origin, and the situation would more likely to be the other way round. The reason why I say this is that - just to go by the most important modern study of Indonesian gold, the one by Anne Richter and Bruce Carpenter, *Gold Jewellery of the Indonesian Archpelago* - the basic shape would seem to be firmly Southeast Asian (they do not mention an "external" origin). A necklace which features as its central piece one like the two biggest components in Linda's piece above occurs on p. 443, and is described as Aceh (18th-19th c), the caption significantly explaining: "The main pendant form is based on the breadfruit leaf and is often said to have originated in Malacca [in Malaysia]. It is common in antique Malaysian necklaces." The piece which Alaa has posted is related to Linda's though slightly different and one which I have myself actually seen more often, though that may be quite accidental. In any case, it (Alaa's piece) is indeed related to the form in Linda's necklace above. I have also seen it described as belonging to more than one place, but, going again by Richter and Carpenter, I find a very closely related example on p. 226, which is described as a leaf-shaped pendant from the Bugis in South Sulawesi. This is actually not surprising - several Sumatran and Bugis pieces resemble each other. The question remains whether the form is "native" (Southeast Asian) or - if it was derived through Islam - came from Yemen (and possibly elsewhere in the Islamic world. Again, the Bugis object is described by Richter and Carpenter as representing the stylised leaves of the breadfruit tree, "said to originate in Malacca in the 14th century". It would I suppose also be possible, however, that the basic shape arrived in Aceh through Islam (or even earlier), but then was interpreted by people in Indonesia and Malaysia as being derived from the breadfruit tree. A matter perhaps not easy to settle! What one can say with some confidence is that both forms shown (even if not identical) are definitely found with some frequency (perhaps particularly Alaa's) in Southeast Asia. I would not dare to be categorical about the whole issue, however.
PS to previous longer post: I find another alleged South Sumatran example of what is in essence the form of Alaa's piece on p. 117 of Bruce Carpenter's *Ethnic Jewellery from Indonesia*. It is the bottom pendant of a large necklace. This is Carpenter's text: "The large pendant of this Hindu-Buddhist-inspired design have [sic - he means "has"] been described as stylised leaves of the breadfruit tree ... Probably made in Palembang, the addition of butterflies belies [does he mean "reveals"???] Chinese influence".
Thanx Joost, alas i don't have these books to compare with but it seems more than obvious that "biodiversity hotspot" of such shapes lies somewhere in the indonesian archipelago with a mere lone occurence outside of that place, which is the yemeni one...easy to understand why it did reach there through the study of the yemeni seafarers migrations and their connection with south eastern asia!
My main concern is the explanation given of the shape by various scholars: i mean that the breadfruit tree leaves is a wonderful theory and fit ramarkably with the malayo-polynesian origin of the various indonesian people for whom this tree is very important and was a stapple food in competition with the more asiatic rice BUT on the other hand the Hind-buddhist design which would have a south asian origin would fit more with the possible translation of the yemeni pendant called in Hadramaut "KISRA" which in arabic could mean "Bird of prey" and thus would confirm the mythological figure of "Garuda" in indian religions!
I mean indonesian would not ignore such an important figure especially in Sumatra which was directly connected to India, but the advent of islam has made hidu beliefs vanish with traces remaining in material culture....a later transition from garuda (hindu related) to breadfruit (symbol devoid of religious dimension) would have maintained the shape without troubling newly settled believes, institution and psyche!
The yemenis on the other hand after importing such a shape did not have the bias of the breadfruit (they simply ignore it) but easily recognized the zoomorphic avian shape!
A very good and informative, thought-provoking post, Alaa! Thanks. I am sure Linda will also be interested. And hopefully others ...
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