Posted 6 months ago
greenjean
(6 items)
I found this ring in with a bag of "junk" jewelry at a thrift store several years ago. It is silver, heavy and rather crudely made. I don't know if the letters are initials done in Latin?, Cyrillic?, Russian??? Not sure how the letters should be so took two photos. Inside, it looks like Chinese characters which makes it even more confusing. Can anyone out there make heads or tails of this? I have tried looking the letters up online but nothing really makes sense. The Chinese characters on the inside are not very clear and even worse in the photo...sorry. Thanks for any help!
My first impression was that the ring might be used to leave a wax seal impression.
Man, oh Manischewitz, the Collectors Weekly Show & Tell software is really acting up today. >8-0
Anyway.
greenjean,
"I don't know if the letters are initials done in Latin?, Cyrillic?, Russian??? Not sure how the letters should be so took two photos."
I think you're onto something, because your second picture would make sense in Cyrillic. It would be from left to right, the "Ya" or "Ja" character, (it looks like a backwards Roman capital "R," the "En" or "Ne" character (it looks like a Roman capital "H," and the "Be" character (it looks like a Roman lower case "b" with a crooked neck):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_alphabets
The result doesn't translate into a word insofar as I can tell (I used DeepL to test that out), so it's probably initials.
Watchsearcher,
"My first impression was that the ring might be used to leave a wax seal impression."
Yup, a signet ring.
In western monograms, usually the center initial is larger, and represents a surname. All bets are off here, because this ring was made somewhere in the far east.
CW S&T user apostata probably won't be well pleased with me for making no attempt to translate the Asian ideographs, but I've never had much success with those.
So: a signet ring made somwhere in far east Asia, and bearing Cyrillic initials. That's all I got. :-(
Watchsearcher -
Thanks for the info… as far as you can go with it anyway. Now I know a little more. I fear it will always be a mystery as far as age, etc.
Thanks!
greenjean, I just thought I'd let you know that I took the further step of plugging those Cyrillic characters directly into Google, and I got more than a few hits, many of them for a Russian model named Nastya Yanb.
Is that her real surname? Dunno, but this piece was interesting, if only for the opinion of Instagram (translation courtesy of DeepL):
*snip*
Social network recognized as extremist and banned in the Russian Federation
*snip*
https://www.thevoicemag.ru/fashion/news/02-12-2021/mercedes-benz-fashion-week-russia-kreatory-o-o-proekte-feshnvikhauz/