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Description: | A heavy silver ring (13.99g) with rounded shoulders and a slightly raised flat bezel that roughly corresponds to Henig's type XI. The bezel is mounted with a bright orange-red cornelian depicting (in impression) a goat kneeling to the right and looking back over his shoulder at a single branched palm tree beneath which he sits.The type is similar to a number of cornelians recorded by Martin Henig in his corpus. Those animals are described as stags and all face left, not right, but they still furnish the closest parallels to this example (Henig p167, nos. 616-9). They are dated to the 3rd century AD; this gem, of slightly better style, probably thus belongs to a slightly earlier date, somewhere later in the second century being the most likely. The form of the ring is consistent with this date.It is unlikely that this gem was a product of the artisan (or artisans) whose work was so well represented in the Snettisham jeweller's hoard (Johns 1997). The subject is not known on the gems from that assemblage and, in any case, the cutting on this specimen is finer than the sloppily and sketchily engraved gems symptomatic of that assemblage. Nor is the form of the ring very close to the very standardised Snettisham rings.Maximum internal diameter 18mm.
Original Image | Publisher: | http://finds.org.uk | Source: | Portable Antiquities | Identifier: | http://finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/r... | Go to resource |
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