18K Gold Rope Necklace

Cultures throughout history took varied approaches to creating gold wire. While Egyptians and early Mesoamerican cultures cast their wire, the ancient Greeks took the most difficult and refined approach. To create their wire, with which they performed astonishing feats of the goldsmith's art, the Greeks hammered gold into sheets of extreme thinness, cutting them into delicate strips, which they then rolled into wire by hand. Further, they had many methods of ornamenting the wire, giving it pattern and texture. The twisted, braided wire of this necklace, created in the later European manner by drawing gold through smaller and smaller holes, recalls Greek and Hellenistic wirework masterpieces.