For 5,000 years gold has been appreciated, not just for its beauty, often associated
with the blaze of the sun by early civilisations, but for the ease with which
it could be worked into ornaments, even by primitive craftsmen. Those ornaments
were not just a symbol of wealth and power for the living, but also were often
buried to accompany men and women into the Afterlife. Since gold is so durable,
they have survived to provide us with a unique record of ancient civilisations,
especially when the gold was cast as flowers or animals or embossed or engraved
with scenes of hunting or fighting; a way of life captured not in a painting or
a photograph, but in gold.
This section describes not only 12 major civilisations that made significant contributions
to the goldsmiths' art, but lists nearly fifty museums in twenty countries that
have either collections of gold artefacts from one or more of these civilisations
or are currently mounting special exhibitions on gold. Our gold
library/history and gold
library/jewellery sections also list many books about these civilisations
and the gold they produced.