Antique singing bowls are older than people think. You may notice that I list the approximate age of the singing bowls which is something only a few people do. You may also notice that, at least as of 2024, my dates are very different from what you see other places. Why do different websites say different things and how old are the original singing bowls?
From my perspective as the leading expert for many years, merchants are not dating their singing bowls in a systematic way so as a consumer, you have no way to really know how old the bowl is. It may not matter to you, but in fact the age has a lot to do with the best sonic characteristics. The older bowls sound better, plus they are much more rare and valuable.
My dating system was one of the first, starting in 1998 when I began seeking out the different types of antique singing bowls. Early on, I based my dating on the typical approach of examining the wear patterns on the surface of the metal. This is the method used by other people today and it is unfortunately very limited and leads to a majority of incorrect dating.
In the worst case, this incorrect dating means people think a singing bowl is older than it really is. They may even call a new singing bowl an antique, which happens frequently. Just yesterday, a customer told me about a shop selling dozens of antiques. When I checked the shop, I saw dozens of new bowls made similarly to the later antiques. People simply cannot tell the difference, which is why I have helped clarify this topic for so many years. I even had confusion myself early on. One of the first “antiques” I bought - from an actual antique shop - was in fact a new bowl.
The way I date singing bowls is based on a combination of experience, science and culture. It starts with my experience handling the thousands of singing bowls that churned through the wholesale marketplace in Nepal over the past 25 years. By systematically cataloging every type of bowl, I was able to categorize them as you see on The Singing Bowl Museum website.
Categorizing them by type is really categorizing them by maker because each maker left unique stylistic differences. Categorizing them by maker is really dating them because each maker had a finite number of years to work. Therefore, out of the huge catalog of bowls I sorted, collected (and many rejected), I was able to discern every different type of bowl and place them on a continuous timeline. I can discern multiple generations of bowl makers who used the same tools. I can sometimes even tell bowls made by the same maker, from earlier or later in their career. No one else has such an intimate knowledge of the antique singing bowls like I do, simply because I handled so many for so many years. I collected more than other dealers from the beginning and assembled a much larger collection over time.
However, it is not only my experience. I also work with science, which has strongly verified my dates. While other people look at a bowl and try to guess the age by the smoothness of the hammer marks or the color of the patina, I am utilizing a comprehensive approach that combines metallurgical and cultural facts with my in depth knowledge.
It was in the metallurgical labs that the breakthrough really happened. I first took singing bowls to the lab to determine the content of the metal. This groundbreaking work put an end to the “7 metal” myth, which most people today understand is completely false. Antique singing bowls and new hand hammered singing bowls are made from bell metal bronze, which is a combination of copper and tin. The majority of singing bowls sold today are actually brass, which is made of copper and zinc. Brass lacks the warm and beautiful sound of real bronze. Brass bowls are also cast, not hammered, so they lack the sonic complexity of a real hammered singing bowl. So, the majority of singing bowls are not actually singing bowls: they are made of a different metal and made by casting rather than hammering. Yet many merchants persist in calling those cheap brass bowls “7 metal singing bowls.” This is a selling tactic and perpetuation of a false myth on the internet.
Having established the real truth about the metal content, my next task was to take my dating system further. By 2010, I understood the limits of dating by examining surface wear. Myself and other dealers were able to date bowls for a few hundred years with this method, but I realized that at a certain age, the methodology is no longer effective. In short, the older the metal is, the less specific you can be about the dates. It is easy to determine the date of a later bowl, but the older they get, the less information you seem to have by that method. So by 2010, I was looking for a more effective way to date the bowls, something no one else has done.
By that time I had also categorized many of the different types of bowls and built the timeline, noting which types of bowls were always older and which types were always younger. When I looked at the bowls on the timeline, it seemed some were much older than anyone thought. I noticed they had more extreme wear, the unique fold separation which I discuss elsewhere and heavier patination than the younger types. It was obvious that some of the bowls were much older than others but it was impossible to tell exactly how much older, until science came to the rescue. I was dating the early bowls as “16th century or earlier” because I knew the bowls were older but could not say how old. The limitation of examining surface wear was now undeniable.
It was at this time that I fortuitously found the Archaeological Metallurgists at Oxford who wanted to study the antique Himalayan bronze. Their work in the lab was done under electron microscopes and was based on their vast experience in the field of “high tin bronze,” as it’s called. Their work determined that the singing bowls were directly related to high tin bronze bowls made in Persia from the 9th-12th century. Both types of bowls are made the same way, with the same metal, the same hammering techniques, the same heating and cooling techniques, even the same shapes and decorative motifs. I found many examples of the Persian bowls, including nearly exact duplicates of the Himalayan singing bowls.
We therefore determined that the Himalayan makers of the singing bowls learned their craft from the Persian artisans who made the earlier bowls. Due to the complexity of the manufacturing process, they must have been taught first hand how to do it. The similarities are not small but exact. The artisans could not have looked at a finished bowl and figured out the process. They must have been instructed directly in the firing, cooling and hammering techniques.
They may have even gotten their tools from the Persian source, who had been working bronze for thousands of years. Persia is one of the only places in the world where both tin and bronze were found in the same place, so it was one of the first cultures to develop bronze making. The craft persisted for many centuries until at this late stage, it seems Persian artisans traveled along the silk roads and taught Newari artisans how to work the bronze, resulting in these wonderful singing bowls. Since it is a continuous craft, we know that the early singing bowls must have been made at the latest by the 12th century.
I therefore start my dates for the singing bowls at the 12th century. The earliest pieces could be older. With this new knowledge, I was able to ascribe more accurate dates to the early singing bowls, which I have a disproportionate number in The Singing Bowl Museum collection. While the early singing bowls are exceptionally rare and few in number compared to later bowls, I have few later bowls in the collection, simply because they were much more common. I focused the collection more on the early bowls and those from what I call the high period, around the 16th-17th century when some of the very best bowls were made. After that time, by the 18th century, the singing bowls became more popular and made in much greater numbers. Fortunately for the makers, they had adopted a new method that made their work much easier and faster.
The metallurgical research revealed more than the connection to ancient Persia. The scientists at Oxford also determined that there were two distinctly different types of metallurgy found in the antique singing bowls; the ancient Persian method and a later method from Southeast Asia, specifically Cambodia. This later method of making the bowls was faster, required less hammering and finishing. They abandoned the labor intensive folding technique of the early bowls so there was a stylistic shift as well as a metallurgical one.
This change took about 100 years to be fully implemented, probably as generational change occurred. Some bowls show signs of both early and later techniques, which I call transitional period. The transitional period helps to prove all of this dating methodology because the transitional bowls show a clear connection between the early and late period work. For example, we see later period bowls with no folding, yet with early period engravings. Such transitional pieces also fit in with the surface wear techniques and absolutely look to be in the middle between the perfectly smooth early bowls and the more textured later bowls.
There is so much agreement between the elements involved in dating singing bowls: the different dating methods I use, the various metallurgy discovered by Oxford, the singing bowl shapes themselves, the hammering techniques, the finishing techniques, the stylistic similarities: all the elements align. This agreement of scientific and cultural elements give us a clear timeline for every type of singing bowl. You can see the whole history here at The Singing Bowl Museum.
The early bowls were made from the 12th - 16th centuries. The later bowls were made from the 16th-20th centuries. Once tourism started in Nepal, the bowl production ramped up and today they make more singing bowls than ever before. The number of hammered bronze bowls made in one year now outnumbers all the bowls made in antiquity. The number of cheap brass bowls made in one month outnumbers all the bowls made in antiquity.
The antiques are very rare and precious. They not only hold a special place in history, they also do something nothing else can do. New singing bowls, brass singing bowls, crystal bowls nor any other instrument can perform the special magic of a fine antique singing bowl. Read my other articles to find out why the antiques are so much more special.
Leave a comment