The Evora Gorget

Extract

To the appreciation of the Society I submit an exhibit which seems to me well worthy of some further study and discussion. I have not brought over the original, because it is a ponderous mass of gold, worth almost £300, and because masses of gold are unfit to travel without an escort; but the workshop attached to the Saint-Germain Museum has made an excellent electrotype to be circulated with a developed drawing. The facsimile will be gilded and exhibited in the Museum, the original remaining confined to my safe, an appropriate location for heavy jewels which have a dangerous tendency to find their way, through improper hands, to the melting-pot. This extraordinary gorget—let us call it thus without prejudging its use—is in massive gold, at the standard of 800, and weighs 2,300 grammes, or nearly 74 oz. troy (fig. 1). It is said to have been unearthed in or about 1883 in Portugal, province of Alemtejo, not far from Evora, by a peasant who was digging at the foot of a tree. His spade must have been energetically handled, as it has chipped pieces of the metal in six neighbouring places. I do not think that the injury was done purposely by the finder in order to ascertain if it were truly gold. I have been told that he found three similar gorgets and that the two smaller ones were at once melted down, which I have some reason to disbelieve. The biggest gorget was first acquired by a Portuguese lady called Mattos, who bequeathed it to her daughter; the latter sold it to the father of M. Joaquim Arantes Ferreira da Silva, who, after having failed to sell it in turn to the Museum in Lisbon (then lacking funds), parted with it in favour of our Museum (June 1920), where it has been registered as number 67071, but as yet neither exhibited nor published.