WHY I WROTE THE BOOK
After retirement from the Foreign Service in 2001, I began to organize and document the collection. I lectured, mounted exhibits, and eventually participated in a seminar on Yemeni culture at the Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington, D.C., in 2003. It was my first lecture featuring only Yemeni traditional jewelry. I showed wonderful photos of pieces I had collected but made it clear that I knew little about their provenance. One of Yemen’s luminaries – a U.S.-educated man who had been Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, Minister of Culture, Minister of Development, university president, etc. was sitting in the front row. He commented to someone sitting next to him, “She does not know the background of the pieces? I never knew such Yemeni pieces existed!” He begged me to research and document this beautiful part of Yemeni culture before the knowledge was lost.
When my much-loved husband died suddenly three months after that seminar, I reached out for something to distract me from my grief and immediately applied for a grant to do research in Yemen. I began research the next fall. No one had talked to the silversmiths and the women who wore the pieces. I was uniquely qualified to do the research, for I owned many examples and I speak Arabic.
About Marjorie
With the help of American Institute for Yemeni Studies research grants, Marjorie Ransom spent all-told a year in Yemen from 2004 to 2009, studying jewelry and costumes and their significance. The result was the book, Silver Treasures from the Land of Sheba: Yemeni Regional Jewelry. She is writing a second volume on silversmiths.
Ms. Ransom lived twice as a U.S. diplomat in Yemen in a thirty-year career that also took her to Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, Syria, and Egypt. She and David Ransom, her late husband, were the first Arabic-speaking tandem couple in the U.S. Foreign Service. Over the course of their career, they assembled a collection of some 2000 pieces of Middle Eastern silver jewelry.
Ms. Ransom has three daughters and six grandchildren and lives in Washington, DC.
Articles
Marjorie Ransom wrote for a variety of publications:
“Research in Yemen” for Yemen Update, the Journal of the American Institute for Yemen Studies, in 2005.“Silver Working in Yemen before and after the Jewish Exodus in the late 1940s” for TEMA, a Journal for Judeo-Yemenite Studies, in 2007.
“The Laazim, an essential piece of wedding jewelry,” for the acquisition catalogue of the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris in 2008.
“Yemeni Traditional Silver Jewelry, Will It Survive?” for Thakerah, the online journal of Dar al-Mawruth, an ethnographic museum in Sana'a, Yemen, in 2009.
“Middle Eastern Jewelry: Vestige of an Earlier Way of Life” for the catalogue for the exhibit, Women in Orient, at the Musee du Quai Branly, in 2010.
“Yemeni Traditional Silver Jewelry” for the Wereldmuseum in Rotterdam in 2010.
“The Enduring Craft of Yemeni Silver” for the January/February 2012 issue of Saudi Aramco World.
“Silver Speaks” for Durrah magazine in Bahrain in September 2012.
“Arabic Silver Jewelry: The Allure of the Traditional” for Ornament, Volume 36 No. 5, pp. 60–65, in 2014.