Amber

Amber was one of the first substances used by man for decoration, and it was also employed at a very early period for amulets and for medicinal purposes. More or less shapeless pieces of rough amber, marked with circular depressions, have been found in Prussia, Schleswig-Holstein, and Denmark, in deposits of the Stone Age. These depressions are sometimes regularly disposed and at other times irregularly, and seem intended to imitate similar depressions found in large stones and rocks, often the work of man’s hand, but occasionally the result of natural causes. In Hoernes’ opinion they marked the resting place of the spirit or spirits believed to animate the stone, and hence it is probable that the amber fragments were used as talismans or amulets.[44]

For the ancient Greek poets, the grains of amber were the tears annually shed over the death of their brother Phaëthon by the Heliades after grief had metamorphosed them into poplars growing on the banks of the Eridanus (the modern river Po).[45] In a lost tragedy of Sophocles, he saw the origin of amber in the tears shed over the death of Meleager by certain Indian birds. For Nicias it was the “juice” or essence of the brilliant rays of the setting sun, congealed in the sea and then cast up upon the shore. A more prosaic explanation likened amber to resin, and regarded it as being an exudation from the trunks of certain trees. Indeed, the poetic fancy we have just noted is the same idea clothed in a metaphorical or mythological form. Another fancy represented amber to be the solidified urine of the lynx, hence one of its names, lyncurius.[46]

THE TREE THAT EXUDES AMBER.

From the “Hortus Sanitatis,” of Johannis de Cuba [Strassburg, Jean Pryss, ca. 1483]; De lapidibus, cap. lxx. Author’s library.

The brilliant and beautiful yellow of certain ambers and the fact that this material was very easily worked served to make its use more general, and it soon became a favorite object of trade and barter between the peoples of the Baltic Coast and the more civilized peoples to the south. Schliemann found considerable amber from the Baltic in the graves of Mycenæ, and the frequent allusions to it in the works of Latin authors of the first and succeeding centuries testify to its popularity in the Roman world.

Probably the very earliest allusion in literature to the ornamental use of amber appears in Homer’s Odyssey,[47] where we read:

Eurymachus

Received a golden necklace, richly wrought,

And set with amber beads, that glowed as if

With sunshine. To Eurydamas there came

A pair of ear-rings, each a triple gem,

Daintily fashioned and of exquisite grace.

Two servants bore them.

Amber ingeniously carved into animal forms has been discovered in tumuli at Indersoen, Norway.[48] These curious objects were worn as amulets, and the peculiar forms were supposed to enhance the power of the material, giving it special virtues and rendering it of greater value and efficacy.

Pieces of amber with singular natural markings were greatly esteemed, especially when these markings suggested the initials of the name of some prominent person. Thus, we are told that Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia paid to a dealer a high price for a piece of amber on which appeared his initials. The same dealer had another piece on which he read the initials of Charles XII of Sweden. When he received the news of this king’s death, he bitterly lamented having lost the opportunity of selling him amber for a high price. But he was cleverly consoled by Nathaniel Sendal, the relator of the story, who easily persuaded the dealer that the markings could just as well signify the initials of some other name. Sendal adduces this as a proof that the letters read on such pieces of amber were as much the product of the observer’s imagination as of the markings on the material.[49] Those who secured amber so mysteriously marked by Nature’s hand probably felt that they had obtained a talisman of great power, especially destined for their use.