You spiral wind the gold wire to a specific diameter as you see here, and then you can cut off individual loops to make a chain. What you see here is just an intermediate stage in the production of jewelry.
Finally someone sees the obvious.
Anyone who has worked on metal jewelry would know immediately what those spirals are.
To make chains, ornamental or practical, in that size, the metal, gold, silver, or bronze is progressively drawn thru a die of a harder metal. The result is wire which can be left round or beaten flatter.
The spirals are the first evidence of mass profuction.
The wire is wrapped around a metal mandrel, basically a rod, in tight coils. And when usung precious metals the coils are, of course, short.
The chains of round links I made were cut from the coil with a very fine jeweler’s saw blade but one could just as well used a small chisel. Cutting along the longitudinal axis of the mandrel has them dropping off rapidly. The amount of soft gold coils could be reduced to links in less than two hours. Mass production.
The cut links because of the spiral wrapping, have ends that don’t meet but are offset the width of the wire used. A simple twist to have them meet after linking with another cutoff link and you have the v beginning of a chain.
The joined link ends can the be soldered together to appear monolithic.
“You spiral wind the gold wire to a specific diameter as you see here, and then you can cut off individual loops to make a chain. What you see here is just an intermediate stage in the production of jewelry.”
That’s crazy talk!
What we see is obviously someone attempting to hide the gold from a robbery of the Tribal Mint as shavings on the floor of a bronze workshop.
I mean, come on. Hasn’t anyone ever heard of Occam’s Razor?