Amber in ancient times
When Phaëthon one day had persuaded his father Helios to let him drive the chariot of the sun across the sky, the horses ran away with him and he first came too near the vault of heaven and set fire to it, so that the Milky Way was formed; then he approached too near the earth, set the mountains on fire, dried up rivers and lakes, burned up the Sahara, scorched the negroes black, until, to avoid greater disasters in his wild career, Zeus struck him down with his thunderbolt into the river Eridanus. His sisters, the daughters of the sun, wept so much over him that the gods in pity changed them into poplars, and their tears then flowed every year as amber on the river’s banks. “For this reason amber came to be called ‘electron,’ because the sun has the name of ‘Elector.’” In this way the Greeks, in their poetry, thought that amber was formed. The mythical river Eridanus, which no doubt was originally in the north (cf. Herodotus), was later identified sometimes with the Rhone, sometimes with the Po. Herodotus [iii. 115] says of northern Europe: “I do not suppose that there is a river which the barbarians call Eridanus, and which flows into the sea to the northward, from whence amber may come.... For in the first place the name Eridanus itself shows that it is Hellenic and not barbarian, and that it has been invented by some poet or other”; and in the second, he was not able to find any eye-witness who could tell him about it (cf. [p. 27]); but in any case he thought that amber as well as tin came from the uttermost limits of Europe.
Places where amber is found (marked with crosses)
The most important sources of amber in Europe are the southern coast of the Baltic, especially Samland, and the west coast of Jutland with the North Frisian islands. It is also found in small quantities in many places in western and central Europe, on the Adriatic, in Sicily, in South Africa, Burmah, the west coast of America, etc. Northern amber, from the Baltic and the North Sea, is distinguished from other kinds that have been investigated, by the comparatively large proportion of succinic acid it contains, and it seems as though almost all that was used in early antiquity in the Mediterranean countries and in Egypt was derived from the north. Along the coasts of the Baltic and North Sea the amber is washed by the waves from the loose strata of the sea-bottom and thrown up on the beach. When these washed-up lumps were found by the fishers and hunters of early times they naturally attracted them by their brilliance and colour and by the facility with which they could be cut. It is no wonder, therefore, that amber was used as early as the Stone Age for amulets and ornaments by the people on the Baltic and North Seas, and spread from thence over the whole of the North. In those distant times articles of amber were still rare in the South; but in the Bronze Age, in proportion as gold and bronze reach the north, they become rarer there, but more numerous farther south. In the passage-graves of Mycenæ (fourteenth to twelfth centuries B.C.) there are many of them, as also in Sparta at the time of the Dorian migration (twelfth to tenth centuries B.C.; cf. [p. 14]). It is evident that amber was the medium of exchange wherewith the people of the North bought the precious metals from the South, and in this way it comes that the two classes of archæological finds have changed their localities. The neolithic ornaments of amber at Corinth, already referred to, the amber beads of the Fifth Dynasty in Egypt, and those of the neolithic period in Spain, show, however, if they are northern, that this connection between South and North goes back a very long way. But the Greek tribes among whom the Iliad originated do not appear to have known amber, as it is not mentioned in the poem, and it is first named in the more recent portions of the Odyssey (put into writing in the eighth century B.C.). Among the jewels which the Phœnician merchant offered to the Queen of Syria was “the golden necklace hung with pieces of amber” [Od. xv. 460]. We must therefore believe that the Phœnicians were the middlemen from whom the Greeks obtained it at that time. But it was not so much esteemed by the Greeks of the classical period as it became later, and they rejected it in their art industries, for which reason it is seldom mentioned by Greek authors. Thales of Miletus (600 B.C.) discovered that when rubbed it attracted other bodies, and from this important discovery made so long ago has sprung the knowledge of that force which dominates our time, and which has been named from the Greek word for amber, “electron.”
Among the Romans of the Empire this substance was so highly prized that Pliny tells us [xxxvii., chap. 12] that “a human likeness made of it, however small, exceeds the price of a healthy living person.” This was both on account of its beauty and of its occult properties; when worn as an amulet it was able to ward off secret poisons, sorcery and other evils. It therefore naturally became an article that was in great demand, and for which merchants made long voyages.
It has been thought that the North Sea amber came into the southern market before that of the Baltic, and as the Eridanus of the myth was sometimes taken for the Rhone and sometimes for the Po, it was believed that in early times amber was carried up the Rhine and across to both these rivers, later also up the Elbe to the Adriatic [cf. Schrader, 1901, “Bernstein”]. It was thought that the archæological finds also favoured this theory; but it must still be regarded as doubtful, and it is scarcely probable that the Phœnicians obtained it from the mouths of the Rhone and the Po, while they may have brought it by sea at an early period. By what routes amber was distributed in the earliest times is still unknown.
Phœnician warship, according to an Assyrian representation
Voyages of the Phœnicians