Ornament And Amulet

The Nasser D. Khalili Collection contains a remarkable group of more than 600 finger rings from the Islamic world and beyond. These rings provide a rare opportunity to survey the history of this form in the Middle East and southern Asia over the last two millennia, for the oldest examples are two Hellenistic glass rings from athe second or first century BC, while the most recent dated specimen is a signet made in India in 1920. This wealth of evidence has allowed the author to present a typology of Islamic rings within a broad chronological framework, and the colour illustrations standard to the series have been supplemented by several drawings of each ring.