Bethlehem is the centre of an industry in mother-of-pearl which supplies beads, rosaries, inlaid work, carvings, and miscellaneous ornaments or souvenirs to all parts of the world.

In 2018, researchers discovered the grave of an 8-year-old child buried in a fetal position. Thousands of beads covered the child’s chest and neck, and a perforated stone pendant and mother-of ...

Gilded metal bouquet holder with mother of pearl handle. The funnel-shaped vase is comprised of pierced Rococo Revival motifs. Around the lip, small peach-colored beads are mounted in the center of ...

Mother-of-pearl is the hard, silvery, internal layer of several kinds of shells, especially oysters, the large varieties of which in the Indian Seas secrete this coat of sufficient thickness to ...

This impressive necklace, reassembled from beads, a pendant and a mother-of-pearl ring, was found in a child’s grave at an ancient Middle Eastern farming village.

The beads could have taken 10 people seven months to make. ... He added that many of the shells might have appeared iridescent because some of the shells still retained a mother-of-pearl effect.

In 2018, archaeologists excavating a burial site in southern Jordan made an extraordinary find: thousands of beads fashioned from amber, turquoise, sea shells, and other materials, along with an ...

Mother-of-pearl can be traced back to the Mesopotamians in 2500BC, and China’s Ming and Shang dynasties (the latter goes back to 1500BC). The Victorians, never ones to shy away from the ornate ...

The history of threading beads is a long one — at least 140,000 years for the shells with threadable holes found in Bizmoune Cave, close to what is now Essaouira, Morocco. Beads have appeared in ...