The Tourqouise Cross Sterling Silver Earrings feature a design with leverback closures for secure and comfortable wear.
 
Across cultures and history, silver has carried spiritual and symbolic weight as well as financial value. Sumerian and Egyptian artisans were working it into religious objects by the third millennium BCE, and Egyptians at times prized it above gold. Across many mythologies Greek Selene, Vedic Chandra, Celtic Arianrhod its cool white sheen tied it to the moon and to cycles of renewal.
 
The oldest turquoise mines sit in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, worked from roughly 3000 BCE near a temple dedicated to the goddess Hathor; the Egyptians called the stone "mefkat," meaning joy or delight. Persian turquoise later covered the domes of palaces and mosques because its sky-blue color was read as an image of heaven, a tradition that influenced later monuments such as the Taj Mahal. Independently, Indigenous peoples of the American Southwest and Mesoamerica developed their own turquoise traditions, using it in ceremony and regarding it as a bridge between earth and sky.
 
The cross predates Christianity as a shape used across the ancient world, but its meaning as a specifically Christian emblem developed gradually. For roughly three centuries after Jesus's death, most Christians avoided depicting it openly, since death by crucifixion was, under Roman law, a mark of shame reserved for slaves and the condemned. Its widespread adoption in Christian art followed Emperor Constantine's conversion in the 4th century, after which it shifted from the sign of a Roman execution method to a visual sign of victory over death and later branched into regional forms such as the Celtic, Coptic, and Latin cross.