While jewelry continues to be made today, the most handsome pieces may be dated to the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was worn massed around the head, shoulders and arms, and some of the most ornate pieces are integral accessories to head-dresses and hairstyles. Unmarried girls wore a comparatively simple head-dress consisting of an embroidered skull-cap covered with an ornament formed of a circular disc from which chains and pendants radiated. Married women had a more impsing head dress in the form of a tall hat which was decorated across the front with a massive convex diadem or a more flexible band of linked plaques and chains. Various pendants adorned the hair, such as long multiple chains attached at the temples to frame the face, and heavy plaques joined to the end of the long plaits hanging down the wearer’s back. Chains were also twisted into the hair. The neck and breast were lavishly adorned with choker bands and long chains, to which heavy triangular or diamond-shaped pendants were attached, sometimes functioning as amulet-cases. These pieces may be compared with the pendants depicted in miniature paintings of the sixteenth century, and possibly represent the survival of a form which had long gone out of fashion in urban jewelry. An especially distinctive ornament was a large circular cornelian studded disc which functioned as a button fastening at the neck of a woman’s robe. Wrists were encased in a pair of massive silver gauntlet like bracelts which in form resembled the pearl stitched cuffs of early nineteenth century court dress. Contemporary Turkmen jewelry, while continuing in the traditional forms, is more limited in type and quality. It is often made of gift metal stamped into the required shape and often inlaid with glass beads instead of young girls, but increasingly jewlery is confined to the large circular neck fastening and hoop ear rings.
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