When adornments became symbols of love and loss

Long before she became a wife, she first became a bride. On a fourth-century BC Attic vase displayed at the Shaanxi History Museum, a young woman sits at the center of the Epaulia — the celebration held the day after a wedding. Around her, female companions gather as fairies and doves present gifts: a diadem, a bracelet and a necklace. She wears a myrtle wreath, earrings and bracelets, while delicate buttons adorn her garment. Rendered in gilded applied clay, these ornaments shimmer not merely as embellishments, but as symbols of identity, affection and expectation.

More than two millennia later, they provide a fitting introduction to Art in Gold: Jewellery in Hellenistic Times, an exhibition that tells the story of Hellenistic gold through the lives of the women who wore it.

Yet, the vase tells another, quieter story. Excavated from the eastern cemetery of Pella in ancient Macedonia, it had served as a funerary urn. Inside were the cremated remains of a young girl, together with part of a gilded bronze myrtle wreath — the very kind depicted in the painted wedding scene — and a silver bracelet so small it could only have belonged to someone who died before reaching marriageable age.

According to Irini Papageorgiou, curator of the exhibition, the painted Epaulia became a final act of remembrance, allowing in death what life had denied.

"The ancient Greeks regarded the death of an unmarried girl as the greatest possible misfortune, since she was deprived of fulfilling her social and biological destiny — that is, marriage and motherhood," she says.

The belief found one of its most enduring literary expressions in Antigone, the tragedy by fifth-century BC playwright Sophocles. Betrothed yet never married, Antigone laments that she is destined not for a bridal chamber but for a tomb, with death rather than a mortal husband claiming her as his bride. As in the painted Epaulia on the Pella vase, marriage and death become two rites of passage that tragically converge.

"In Hellenistic times, it was believed that the souls of those who had suffered untimely deaths — before marrying and having children — were unable to complete their passage to the Underworld," Papageorgiou says. "Instead, they wandered restlessly between the worlds of the living and the dead. Specific grave goods, including certain types of jewelry, together with particular burial rituals, were intended to assist their passage into the afterlife and appease their anger."

One such object is the Heracles knot, an ornamental motif of two interlocking loops resembling a reef knot. Originating in Egypt in the second millennium BC and later associated with the lion skin of Heracles, it became especially popular in Macedonia after Alexander the Great's conquests, appearing prominently on necklaces and other adornments worn by women.

Its appeal lay in the convergence of politics, mythology and popular belief. For the Macedonian royal house, which traced its lineage to Heracles, the knot evoked heroic virtue and divine ancestry. Yet it also functioned as a protective amulet. As a Greek hero believed to have attained Mount Olympus, Heracles offered those buried with his knot the hope that death itself might be overcome.

Another revealing category of ornaments is the periammata, chains or straps worn diagonally across the torso or fastened over the breast. Depicted on mortal maidens as well as goddesses such as Athena, Artemis and Aphrodite, the term derives from the Greek verb periapto — "to bind" or "to fasten". More than decoration, it served as an amulet, a marker of virginity and perhaps a symbolic restraint before marriage. Similar meanings attached to thigh-bands and garters dedicated by adolescent girls in sanctuaries as they approached adulthood. For those who died before crossing that threshold, such bonds acquired an even deeper resonance.

Another exhibit, a terracotta figurine of a seated young woman with movable arms, wears a painted diadem and earrings that imitate gold jewelry. Unearthed in Pella and dating to the third or second century BC, it belongs to a type known as plangona — jointed dolls or puppets. More than playthings, these figures accompanied girls from childhood to the threshold of marriage and were often dedicated to the gods before a wedding. Buried in tombs, they became poignant reminders of lives interrupted before that final rite of passage.

Also associated with the prenuptial stage of life are the astragals, or knucklebones, which evoke a game of erotic divination once played with the knucklebones of sheep or goats. Papageorgiou explains that astragalus-shaped ornaments imitate the tarsal bone of mammals, believed in antiquity to possess protective and healing powers. Their frequent appearance in the graves of young women and children suggests they served as amulets, safeguarding their owners through life's most vulnerable transitions.

The spinning top, also found in the burials of Hellenistic women, similarly united play with symbolism. Its ceaseless whirl may have metaphorically expressed a bride's transformation while foreshadowing the course of her future life.

Perhaps the most emotionally evocative objects in the exhibition are the gold wreaths, like the one worn by the young woman depicted on the fourth-century BC Attic vase.

Accompanying their owners through life's defining moments — marriage, coming of age, religious initiation, and, ultimately, death — these exquisitely crafted crowns of myrtle, oak, laurel, and ivy adorned aristocrats, priests, victors, and initiates in sacred mysteries, signifying an individual's place within the social and spiritual order of the Hellenistic world. Yet it was in the funerary sphere that they acquired their deepest significance.

"Relatives gave the deceased, among others, a wreath as to those who had competed in life, reflecting a concept that assimilated the deceased to an athlete. Since the athletic ideal in antiquity was closely associated with the concept of virtue, this idea carries profound moral content," says the curator, referring to an ancient commentary on the works of the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes (c. 446-386 BC).

Plutarch, in his Moralia, states that the deceased deserved to be rewarded, having competed like athletes, and to receive the honors due to them. In other words, placing a wreath upon the dead was, perhaps, to proclaim that life itself had been a contest worthy of honor. Like victorious athletes, the departed were believed to have completed their earthly struggle and earned the final reward: vindication, remembrance, and the hope of eternal life among the virtuous.