Fish-Shaped Brooches

Illustration

by Swiss National Museum
published on 21 January 2019

Fish-Shaped Brooches — Fish-shaped brooches. Gold, silver, with almandine (a precious stone) and glass inlays. c. 500 CE. Bülach. Canton of Zurich.

In early Christianity, the fish was used as a secret sign of identification amongst believers. The Greek word for fish, “ichthus”, is made up of the first letters of the words in the phrase “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour” in Greek.

License

© Swiss National Museum. Republished with permission. Original image by Swiss National Museum. Uploaded by Jan van der Crabben, published on 21 January 2019 under the following license: Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon this content non-commercially, as long as they credit the author and license their new creations under the identical terms. Please note that content linked from this page may have different licensing terms.

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