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The Evora Gorget

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2012

Salomon Reinach
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Extract

To the appreciation of the Society I submit an exhibit which seems to me well worthy of some further study and discussion. I have not brought over the original, because it is a ponderous mass of gold, worth almost £300, and because masses of gold are unfit to travel without an escort; but the workshop attached to the Saint-Germain Museum has made an excellent electrotype to be circulated with a developed drawing. The facsimile will be gilded and exhibited in the Museum, the original remaining confined to my safe, an appropriate location for heavy jewels which have a dangerous tendency to find their way, through improper hands, to the melting-pot. This extraordinary gorget—let us call it thus without prejudging its use—is in massive gold, at the standard of 800, and weighs 2,300 grammes, or nearly 74 oz. troy (fig. 1). It is said to have been unearthed in or about 1883 in Portugal, province of Alemtejo, not far from Evora, by a peasant who was digging at the foot of a tree. His spade must have been energetically handled, as it has chipped pieces of the metal in six neighbouring places. I do not think that the injury was done purposely by the finder in order to ascertain if it were truly gold. I have been told that he found three similar gorgets and that the two smaller ones were at once melted down, which I have some reason to disbelieve. The biggest gorget was first acquired by a Portuguese lady called Mattos, who bequeathed it to her daughter; the latter sold it to the father of M. Joaquim Arantes Ferreira da Silva, who, after having failed to sell it in turn to the Museum in Lisbon (then lacking funds), parted with it in favour of our Museum (June 1920), where it has been registered as number 67071, but as yet neither exhibited nor published.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Antiquaries Journal , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , April 1925 , pp. 123 - 134
Copyright
Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1925

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References

page 124 note 1 An admirable coloured plate representing that gorget was printed in Portugal: a proof of it, offered by the ‘chevalier da Silva, directeur du Musée de Lisbonne’, exists at Saint-Germain. The letterpress is as follows: Grande argola di ouro, achada em Portugal na provincia da Estremadura em 1883, da grandesa do original. That plate must have appeared in a publication which I have not seen. Cartailhac reproduced it without giving his source, and Paris took it from Cartailhac.

page 124 note 2 L'Anthropologie, 1896, p. 374.Google Scholar

page 124 note 3 O Archeol. português, 1896, p. 21.

page 124 note 4 Cartailhac, , Âges préhist. de l'Espagne et du Portugal, p. 297.Google Scholar

page 124 note 5 L'Anthropologie, 1896, p. 373Google Scholar; O Archeol. português, 1896, p. 17Google Scholar; P. Paris, Espagne primitive, p. 424; Brit. Mus. Bronze Age Guide, p. 158.

page 125 note 1 Cartailhac, , Monuments primitifs des Baléares, 1891, fig. 63.Google Scholar

page 125 note 2 Forrer, , Lexikon, pl. 84, 9Google Scholar; Montelius, , Italie septentrionale, pl. 54Google Scholar.

page 125 note 3 Déchelette, , Manuel, iii, fig. 363.Google Scholar

page 125 note 4 Paris, , op. cit., ii, pl. 9.Google Scholar

page 125 note 5 Déchelette, , Manuel, iii, p. 838.Google Scholar

page 125 note 1 Déchelette, , Manuel, ii, p. 298.Google Scholar

page 127 note 1 Siret, , Chronol. ibér., 1913, pl. 6, p. 41Google Scholar; Relig. de l'Ibérie, 1908, pl. 7Google Scholar; Cartailhac, p. 92; Schulten-Gimpera, , Hispania, pl. 3Google Scholar.

page 128 note 1 Reinach, S., Statuaire en Europe, p. 15.Google Scholar

page 129 note 1 Åberg, Nils, La civilisation énéolithique dans la péninsule Ibérique, Paris, 1922.Google Scholar

page 130 note 1 Catalogue of Gold Ornaments, Dublin, 1920.Google Scholar

page 130 note 2 I am sorry that for lack of a drawing I cannot reproduce the lunula said to have been discovered in a dolmen near Allariz. Galicia; see Breuil, , Proc. R. Irish Acad., p. 8, 08 1921Google Scholar.

page 130 note 3 For gold jewels discovered in Spain and in Portugal, see, beside the works of Cartailhac, Paris, Siret, and Schulten, the periodicals Portugalia and O Archeologo português. An illustrated catalogue of all those finds would be of great interest.

page 132 note 1 Martin, Henri, Histoire de France, ii, p. 502.Google Scholar

page 132 note 2 Délég. de la Perse, xiii, p. 1, 41 foll.; Morgan, , Premières civil., p. 197 follGoogle Scholar.

page 132 note 3 Morgan, p. 202; Pottier, , Catal. de vases, i, p. 220Google Scholar.