Hellenistic gold jewellery in the Benaki Museum, Athens

The Benaki Museum Jewellery Collections cover with remarkable comprehensiveness Greek antiquity, Byzantium as well as the post-Byzantine era down to the 19th century. They are world-famous and have represented Greece at major museum institutions in Europe and America. The ancient Greek jewellery collection in particular has been fortuitously enriched with a large number of new acquisitions since Bertha Segall’s seminal 1938 catalogue; as a result, it has featured in several subsequent publications and has attracted the interest of numerous scholars. Monica Jackson is one of these scholars and we were introduced by my dearest old friend and colleague Alexandras Cambitoglou.
Monica persistently and systematically studied the material with the support of Irini Parageorgiou, Curator of Prehistoric, Ancient Greek and Roman Collections, and Angeliki Ziva and with the assistance of all Benaki Museum metal conservators. She is presenting us today with a totally fresh outlook on questions that have perplexed scholars for years while opening up new avenues of communication with the scholarly and wider world of Australia, a continent with which the Benaki Museum is already engaged in fruitful dialogue. (Angelos Delivorrias, from the publisher)

Το βιβλίο αποτελεί ολοκληρωμένη παρουσίαση του συνόλου της ελληνιστικής κοσμηματοτεχνίας του Μουσείου Μπενάκη. Τα κοσμήματα εξετάζονται τόσο ως προς την τυπολογία όσο και ως προς τις σύνθετες τεχνικές κατασκευής τους. Σε ξεχωριστό κεφάλαιο αναπτύσσεται το ιστορικό πλαίσιο, μέσα στο οποίο αναπτύχθηκε η χρυσοχοῒα της περιόδου. Η μελετήτρια έχει επιλέξει επτά κοσμήματα από τη συλλογή, τα οποία πραγματεύεται εις βάθος, χρησιμοποιώντας πλούσιο συγκριτικό υλικό.