Ancient Empires IV

(2010) 2.5" x 2.5" for the pendant. Silver Art Clay (cut, carved, fired, antiqued, polished and burnished), bezel wire, silver wire, amber cabs, coin replica of an antique coin from the island of Rhodes.

In ancient times Rhodes could already look back on an immense historical heritage. It was in turn settled by Minoans, then Dorian Greeks and later steered its own difficult course between Persia, Athens and Sparta, only to eventually become part of Alexander the Great's vast empire.

The Rhodians believed their island was created by the sun-god Helios, and always had a special connection to that deity. When in the aftermath of Alexander's reign one of his heirs, Antigonus, unsuccessfully laid siege to the island and eventually had to withdraw, leaving all of his hardware behind, the grateful Rhodians sold the whole lot of siege engines and battering rams, and with the proceeds created a huge bronze statue to guard their harbor - the famed colossus of Rhodes, an image of Helios himself holding aloft a burning torch.

The statue stood until Rhodes was hit by a massive earthquake in 226 BC, when it broke at the knees and fell over on to the land. Ptolemy III of Egypt offered to pay for the reconstruction of the statue, but the oracle of Delphi made the Rhodians afraid that they had offended Helios, and they declined to rebuild it. Still they featured the face of Helios prominently on their coins.

Outside of being the home of one of the 7 wonders of the ancient world, Rhodes was famed for its schools of rhetoric, its astronomers and it sculptors and was a cultural center with close ties to the city of Alexandria in Egypt. The Roman emperor Tiberius lived on the island for a while, when being exiled by the then emperor Augustus.

For the small Helios coin I chose a setting of 12 rays of flame symbolizing the sun and set the design with a random spatter of amber cabs. The Greek name for amber was electron and was connected to the Sun God, so it seemed like the appropriate stone for an image of this deity. Behind the sun-disk two wire-loops allow a chain to be fed through and make the pendant look as if it was simply floating in front of the necklace.