Beads are the oldest known objects of body decoration. The earliest, simple shells with a pierced hole, have now been dated back almost a hundred thousand years. While the "natural" beads such as shells and pearls pre-date man-made materials by tens of thousands of years, glass beads are surprisingly ancient and encompass enough history to embrace most of human civilization. For a jewelry designer, it is an added pleasure to be part of such a long tradition and worth knowing a little of the story of glass beads.

The oldest true glass beads from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia are around 3,500 years old. Forerunners to true glass, like Egyptian faience and glazed steatite, carry the beginnings of glass beads more than 2,000 years further back into history. But although the technique for making glass was well known in very ancient times, and many historically interesting beads have survived from the early millennia, it was in the fourth century B.C. that the unbroken tradition of fine glass bead-making really began. The city of Alexandria, founded by Alexander the Great, and the cosmopolitan center of an Egypt now dominated by a Greek dynasty, provided an outlet for exporting glass-working skills across the Mediterranean, to Greece, Phoenecia and, most importantly, to Rome.

It was the Roman Empire which began the great global trade in glass beads. During the period from 100 B.C. to 400 A.D. many advances were made in the production of raw glass and the techniques to shape it into beautiful objects. An extensive glass industry developed throughout the Empire and glass beads were a major part of its production. Factories blossomed from the Syrian deserts to the banks of the Rhine and trading routes carried glass beads to far reaches of the Empire and beyond: Roman glass beads have been found in China, Scandinavia, and Central Africa. By the time of the Rome's decline, the global desire for glass beads had been firmly established.

The break up of the Empire led to a sharp drop in the production of glass beads, and workshops in other parts of the world, particularly India, stepped in to supply the glass bead trade, shipping its products on all the maritime trading routes. China and Japan, both with ancient glass bead traditions, continued to supply their own markets.

During the Middle-Ages, glass bead-making continued in various locations of the former Roman lands, sometimes in small workshops and often as a cottage industry, but it was up to the Venetians to re-discover many of the more sophisticated Roman techniques and to re-establish a glass bead-making industry on a major scale, one which was to find a place among the other vibrant arts of the Renaissance. The importance of the Venetian bead industry should not be underestimated. At one time there were more than 250 separate firms making beads and by the 18th century, the weekly output of the Venetian factories was more than twenty tons of finished beads. While the beauty of Venetian beads was unrivalled and their role in European fashion undiminished, it was their value as a trading currency in the newly exploited lands of the Americas, Africa and Asia which fed the boom in production.

In the East Indies trade, glass beads were important, but in Africa and the New World, they played a central role. It is, perhaps, an apocryphal story that Manhattan was purchased for a few strands of glass beads but undoubtedly true that vast quantities of merchandise and real estate were acquired that way. Traders paid beads for furs in North America and beads for slaves in Africa. And because of the Venetian methods of making them in mass quantities from drawn glass, the profits were simply enormous. The extent of this bead trade is reflected in the name we give to a whole category of glass beads, "African Trading Beads". These attractive beads were made, not in Africa, but in Venice; yet such was their value as a trading currency in Africa that they found a permanent home there for centuries. When modern bead collectors discovered their charms and started buying them as antiques, they kept the name of their function rather than their origin. Among the tribes of both North America and Africa, beadweaving, the art of using tiny European seed beads to create a patterned "fabric" or to decorate a hide or cloth became a local tradition still practiced today.

The Venetians fought for centuries to keep their techniques secret, periodically exerting draconian penalties to try and prevent glass makers from leaving and setting up shop elsewhere. But monopolies cannot last forever and many other countries tried to develop their own glass bead industries. The most successful of these was a forested and mountainous region of northern Bohemia, nowadays part of the Czech Republic. Endowed with plentiful quartz sand and with wood for fueling the furnaces and creating potash, Bohemia became a strong rival to Venice. By the end of the nineteenth century Bohemia was leading the world in the production of glass beads for the fashion trade. The handsome "art deco" facades of the Bohemian "bead towns" attest to an early twentieth century boom in glass beads and the wealth that was created by the large scale production of pressed glass, lampwork and seed beads. From this also came the great crystal bead firms although the most famous, Swarovski, sought an even more remote region of Europe to protect their trade secrets.

Later in the twentieth century, a large Japanese seed bead industry was developed, taking some of the market from the Czechs as they had earlier taken it from the Venetians. Today the Chinese are getting in on the global act, as its ancient traditions and skills in glass bead-making are increasingly exploited in the international marketplace. Most exciting is the renaissance in lampwork beads which has been led by individual glass bead artists in America. Without a tradition of their own, yet fuelled by a love of the medium, hundreds of fine American glass bead makers have kindled a renewed enthusiasm for glass bead design around the world. Yet, however the commercial production centers have changed and wherever artistic inspiration for the beads has been discovered, one thing has always remained constant - the ancient and universal appeal of these tiny glass objects.