It was recently announced that the Pearl of Asia, the largest and most beautiful of the pearls known in the world, has been discovered anew: searchers found it in a water cistern in Marseilles, where it had remained in that hiding place throughout the days of the Nazi occupation of France.
Man has been infatuated with pearls since the most ancient of ages, when their home waters were discovered in the seas of southern Asia. The ancient Chinese took care to gather them more than two thousand years before Christ, and the Brahmin scriptures, whose date goes back beyond thirty centuries, contain marvelous descriptions of pearls. These jewels are mentioned many times in the Old and New Testaments; Job the Righteous says, "A virtuous woman, who can find her? Her price is above pearls." And it is said that the Queen of Sheba, when she visited Solomon the Wise, presented him with a great quantity of pearls among the precious gifts she brought him.
In the age of the Roman Empire, pearls were the most valuable and the most widespread of jewels, for they were considered the emblem of divinity and majesty. It is related that one of the Roman commanders paid the expenses of one of his military campaigns with the price of a single pearl which he wrested from one of his mother's earrings. In truth, the passion for pearls and the pressing desire to possess them were so very great that special laws were enacted restricting adornment with them, their use being confined in that era to nobles and aristocrats; the custom
was then revived in Venice and Saxony toward the end of the sixteenth century.
Cleopatra was famed for her mad love of two things: pearls and Antony. To prove the depth of her love for her paramour, it is said that she once placed the most precious pearl she owned in a cup of wine and drank it down with the wine in his honor. Pearls have played a leading role in the history of the British royal jewels since the days of the British kings began. The crown of the first Saxon kings was studded with pearls. An oil portrait of Queen Margaret of Scotland, wife
of James IV, painted in the year 1482, shows that queen girdled with a belt of pearls and wearing a gown studded and embroidered with pearls. Henry VIII was famed for the quantities of them he lavished upon his successive wives. His daughter Queen Elizabeth doted on them passionately; she was extravagant in acquiring them and in adorning herself with them, so that her garments were embroidered with rare pearls and her jewels formed a unique collection of the finest pearls in the world at that time. It is believed that the pearls of the British Imperial Crown are the earrings of that captivating queen. Shakespeare immortalized the beauty of pearls in his play "Romeo and Juliet." A wave of intense enthusiasm swept through all parts of Britain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, until the custom of embroidering costly gowns with them became widespread, and the goldsmiths grew inventive in fashioning jewelry set with them. When the handsome Duke of Buckingham visited Paris, to return from it escorting Henrietta Maria, the bride of Charles I, he wore a purple silk suit embroidered with pearls whose price was valued in that era at more than twenty thousand pounds. And Queen Victoria assembled a great collection of the finest kinds of pearls in the world.
It is worth mentioning that the most famous centers of pearls, or the sources from which they are extracted, are the Emirate of Bahrain, situated at the approaches of the Persian Gulf, and the island of Ceylon. There the natives