This is a small African brass gold weight in the shape of a Sankofa bird. "Sankofa" means "go back and fetch it" in the Akan language. The proverbial significance is to illustrate the lesson that one should learn from the past. Gold weights were very commonly in use to weight gold dust when gold was in regular use as currency. In the same way as all of our authentic, handmade brass objects this gold weight was made by the ancient traditional lost wax casting process where the object is first shaped of bees wax then covered with a sand & clay investment. This unit is dried and then baked so the investment hardens and the wax runs out leaving the space into which the molten brass is poured. Once cooled the investment is removed to yield the object so cast. Every single object of this type, no matter how small, is made this same way, one by one, by hand. As a result of this handmade process each pendant is unique although the design of all is very similar; each gold weight has small differences.

These gold weights measure approximately 7/8 x 7/8 x 7/8" (2.2 x 2.2 x 2.2 cm)