Considering we find Roman glyptic work of merit until nearly the close of the second century A. D., there was in all a period of good gem-engraving covering about eight hundred years.
Throughout all this time the glyptic art flourished under the protection of kings and emperors, who for the general encouragement of the civilizing arts, served their own interests and gratified their tastes for luxury and the beautiful by their constant patronage of gem-engraving.
ABRAXAS.
The unique mystic gems of the Gnostics, known as the Abraxas, are a series by themselves; they had no prototype.
Their strangely decorated and inscribed stone tokens are so characteristic of the sect that they also are easily recognized. The task of explaining the meaning of these incisions is the more difficult, as the veil is almost impenetrable which obscures the history of everything that pertains to these little stone fetiches of the Gnostics.
The very disciples who carried those amuletic gems did so without understanding the meaning of the marks and symbols engraved upon them. They evidently were sacred types of their superstitious creed, invented and placed there by their mentors or priests.
They were Pagans, Jews, and nominal Christians, and we find in their inexhaustible inscriptions a series of emblems, Hebrew and Syriac, which dimly show forth Christ the Son, and Sun of Righteousness with ΑΔΟΝΑΙ, and the seven Greek vowels symbolic of the seven heavens. These Greek vowels have often amused me when I have shown an Abraxas talisman with long inscription to some Greek scholar not acquainted with their gems, who would stumble when he reached the other characters.
SOMMERVILLE COLLECTION.