Page:The Industrial Arts of India.djvu/95

 of these flowers in Indian jewelry is possibly not prehistoric, but has come down from an immemorial tradition. The lotus, which often passes into the sroenti, is seen everywhere in Indian and Chinese and Japanese decoration, and on Assyrian and Babylonian sculptures.

As primitive probably as the twisted gold wire forms of Indian jewelry, is the chopped gold form of jewelry worn also throughout India, the art of which is carried to the highest per- fection at Ahmedabad and Surat in Western India. It is indeed worn chiefly by the people of Gujarat. It is made of chopped pieces, like jujubes, of the purest gold, flat, or in cubes, and, by removal of the angles, octahedrons, strung on red silk. It is the finest archaic jewelry in India. The nail-head earrings are identical with those represented on Assyrian sculptures. It is generally in solid gold, for people in India hoard their money in the shape of jewelry ; but it is also made hollow to perfection at Surat, the flat pieces, and cubes, and octahedrons being filled with lac or dammar.

The beaten silver jewelry of the Gonds, and other wild tribes of the plains of India, and valleys of the inner Himalayas, is also very primitive in character. The singular brooch worn by the women of Ladak y. Miss Gordon Cummings From the Hebrides to the Himalayas, 1876, p. 219], is identical with one found among Celtic remains in Ireland and elsewhere. It is formed of a flat and hammered silver band, hooped in the centre, with the ends curled inward on the hoop ; and this is too artificial a shape to have arisen independently in India and Europe, and must have travelled westward with the Celtic emigration from the East. Its form is evidently derived from the symbols of serpent and phallic worship.

The waist-belt of gold or silver, or precious stones, which is worn in India to gird up the dhoti, or cloth worn about the legs, recalls the Roman cingulum ; and, as in Rome, when the ceremony of changing the toga preetexta for the toga virilis was