Sumerians had such great enthusiasm for jewelry and such high artistic taste and skill with it that their influence on the jewelry of other cultures was strong. They handed their art down to the Assyrians and Babylonians. These in turn brought it to the Persians. The Scythians to the north and Hittites to the west were also impressed. The Scythians eventually introduced Sumerian jewelry culture to the distant Chinese wedding bands , while the Persians took it to Greece, and the Phoenicians spread it throughout the Mediterranean world. None of these widespread cultures made significant improvements in either the art or craft through all these centuries, but at least they kept them alive and adapted them to their own forms.

The art and craft of working metals to make jewelry has been practiced by every culture of man, at one time or another, for tens of centuries. Gold has the most ancient history of them all. Some of the gold jewelry created by craftsmen in ancient India, Egypt, and Assyria has preserved its original character in its descendants for over two thousand years. It is not surprising in modern times to see bracelets, earrings, and other ornaments with filigree work, quaint chainwork, and other features that are remarkably similar to those in pieces taken from Etruscan and Cypriot tombs. There was considerable similarity in some ancient metal jewelry even among widely separated people. Part of this is undoubtedly due to active trading, the migration and dispersal of various cultures, and the wanderings of the craftsmen themselves. Even hundreds of centuries ago there was a strong tendency for art to diffuse itself through the known world. Much of the similarity in the world’s jewelry financing is also due to the independent discovery and rediscovery of the relatively few effective techniques for processing precious metals. Because gold, for example, has certain working characteristics, there are only a limited number of unique wedding bands fabrication processes that can be used to shape it. It can be beaten into very thin sheets, shaped by chasing and repousse work, engraved, cast, formed into delicate filigree, twisted and bent into loops and chains, granulated, and soldered. All of these techniques have been used, forgotten, rediscovered, and used again with the ebb and flow of fashion changes and the rise and fall of the craft, along with the cultures that have nourished it and secure jewelry shopping