The Enquiring Mind

I believe that we can learn a lot, even from the most mundane things, if we adopt an enquiring attitude and seek to satisfy our curiosity.

Take the cufflinks in this picture.

I found these in a charity shop. They were old-looking and grimy. To the naked eye, the design looked like a compass rose. I liked this design, so I bought them.

A look under better light revealed detail I had not seen in the shop. Hallmarks - and a much clearer look at the design. It was no compass rose, that's for sure, but what was it?

I knew that the 925 mark denoted sterling silver, which was good news for me. But what was that other mark?

Marshaling what little I knew on the subject, I reasoned that hexagonal shapes were common in the Art Deco era. Egyptology was also big in that period, inspired by the US tour of Tutankhamun's treasures. (I owe that fragment of knowledge to the National Gallery of Victoria's splendid Art Deco exhibition, BTW).

My magnifying glass revealed the strange mark on the back to be the number 38. Aha! So, I had found a pair of sterling silver cufflinks from the Art Deco period, probably made in 1938, with an Egyptian design. Very satisfying - my enquiring mind had found all that out in just a couple of hours. A job well done.

Except, that I was wrong, wrong, wrong.

The image continued to intrigue me, and I kept looking at it. What were those lozenge shapes arranged in a circle? And why did this design not contain anything that looked as if it was inspired by 1930s Egyptology? I had come to a dead end.

If we maintain our curiosity, inspiration can come from the unlikeliest quarters. Social media, with its vast cross-section of contributors, can be the source of much information that we might never have sought actively.

I published a photo of these links on a forum I'm a member of and, as a side note, asked if anyone could tell what the image was. I had my answer almost straight away. It's a representation of the Mayan calendar. Looking again, you can see that the design does look more South American than Egyptian. The figure in the centre could well be the god Quetzlcoatl. So, silver Art Deco links with a Mayan design, not Egyptian. It seemed to make sense.

Except - I was still wrong.

Long after I put this inquiry to rest, I gave these links a polish. I had been researching Mexican hallmarks  online, after buying a set of sllver Mexican cufflinks. I'd been looking at lots of hallmark pictures, and something occurred to me. The "38" mark was actually inset in a defined shape, unlike the 925 mark, which was just numbers. The rough outline of this shape was something like an eagle.

Mexican silver is often hallmarked with a device known as a silver eagle. The shape of the eagle has changed over time, but my links definitely have the eagle shape that dates to the period 1948-1970. The 38 indicates the city it was made in and the number of a registered designer, not the date. The number "3" indicates the renowned silver centre of Taxco.

A bit more of a dig turned up that the number 38 was possibly one of a number of designers, including  one of Mexico's most famed silversmiths, Antonio Pineda.

So, a piece of Mexican silver jewellery made in Taxco between 1948 and 1970, by one of a handful of Mexican silversmiths, including one of the most famous of them all.

Not Art Deco, not an Egyptian design, and not made in 1938. Well, at least I had got the sterling silver right, although that was the obvious bit.

The lesson I draw from this is that we should not assume that we have the answers, even when we have done our homework. If we maintain our curiosity and remain open to new information we can learn things that, while they may force us to abandon cherished ideas, can lead us to richer knowledge and take us in surprising new directions.

Much of our social dialogue today consists of setting forth our entrenched views without being open to persuasion by others. How much better would public debate be if we just maintained our curiosity about what others think, and remained open to modifying our preconceptions based on what we hear.

Greg.