You can see the tear drop shaped object that almost looks like it is emanating a green light, this object is an axe-head made from jade. More than 1,600 of these axe-heads made from jade have been discovered all over Europe
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4. Mayan Sun God with Shark tooth
It seems as though the giant and ancient Megalodon has had quite the influence on Mayan culture. Megalodon teeth and regular shark teeth are prevalent at most Mayan sites and were used commonly as jewelry, weaponry, and bloodletting tools. It’s known that coastal Maya would hunt sharks so it’s easy to assume that traders began to tell tall tales of the sharks. Tales of these “sea monsters” spread like wildfire into the inland. Which inspired legends and things to be carved with bizarre creatures and things that go bump in the night. A mask was discovered in the northern jungles of Guatemala at the Rio Azul Mayan site made from jade. The sun god Kinich Ahua is depicted in this mask with one large shark tooth. Regular sharks in Mayan art was most often portrayed with the trait of having one tooth.
3. Red Jade Imperial Seal
One color you don’t expect to see when people talk about jade is the color red. Especially a piece that would be described as “almost blood red” not only is it unusual but extremely rare. As you can see the item has the nine dragon stamp and also an inscription: “ Treasure of the imperial bush of Qianlong(CHI-AN-LONG)”. This particular item is quite amazing and in December of 2016 the “blood red” Chinese imperial seal from the 18th century was sold by auction for an unbelievable 21 million euros. We can’t name the collector who won the bid taking home this incredible find, because it was done anonymously, but it did used to belong to Emperor Qianlong at one period of time. Which is why it is inscripted as it is because the emperor used to seal his signed works with the nine dragons that represent masculine energy and power. The reason why this piece of jade is so valued is due to the period that it belongs to which would be 1736 to 1795, art from this period is thought of as a high point in Chinese art.
2. Heirloom Seal of the Realm
This particular and certainly mysterious Chinese artifact has a legend attached to it. In 221 BC, the most fantastic piece of jade was ordered to be found and carved for Qin(CHin) Shi Huang. The piece of jade was indeed found, but it is said that a man even lost his own leg in the attempt to gather the jade! Little to pay for an artifact carved from He Shi Bi jade that was supposed to be an embodiment of the mandate of Heaven? Qin Shi Huang might think so, when he got the carved jade he united the 6 Warring States under the Qin dynasty. A symbol of imperial authority the seal was handed down from ruler to ruler until it mysteriously vanished around AD 900. Why did such a prized seal disappear? No one knows for sure, but it is thought that emperors after Qin Shi Huang(Hu-wan-g) wanted to reduce the significance of the Heirloom Seal, since possession of it was enough to consider a regime “historically legitimate”, that they just hoarded seals obsessively.
Lord Pakal’s Funeral Mask
You can see that this mosaic tiled mask is not something ordinary. The eyes made of obsidian, volcanic glass that is naturally occurring and is made when lava cools really fast with very little crystal growth, and conch shell. The tiles were of jadeite, albite, kosmochlor, and was even veined in quartz, certainly extraordinary. This mask belonged to Lord Pakal the Great and it was his burial mask not something he wore around for war, stature, or fun. Archaeologists excavated his crypt in 1952 and found the jade mask attached to the king's face with a layer of stucco. After this mask was retrieved it was put in Mexico City’s Museo Nacional de Antropologia and unfortunately stolen on Christmas Eve 1984. The culprits were two vet school dropouts who crawled through the air ducts of the museum to get the funeral mask and other valuables only to be thwarted in 1989. That's when the thieves decided to do an illegal exchange, the artifacts for cocaine, only they didn’t realize that the drug trafficker they were trading with was now a police decoy. So only a few years later after the mask and other artifacts were stolen they were once again back in the rightful hands and in good condition.
