Ancient Names for Amber The words used for amber in antiquity often suggest not Brilliance in amber, ice, rock crystal, or any stone was only the qualities for which it was valued, but also possible only because of its transparency. The ancients theories of its origin and the uses to which it was put. believed that transparency was possible because light was Today, although amber is still widely sought out for let through a material: thus transparent materials had jewelry, magic, and medicine, its floral and faunal performative powers.57 The brilliance of amber, inclusions may be its greatest attraction (as reflected in enhanced by the rich connotations of its names, ensured the title of the 1996 exhibition and book Amber: Window it a place in ancient literature alongside other rare, to the Past [Grimaldi 1996]). There is scarce textual prized, and luminous materials—sight-arresting materials evidence before Roman times to indicate an ancient such as gold, silver, and ivory, whose magnificence often fascination with the creature and plant remains interred was associated with something beyond the merely within amber; however, its use in burials may be human, with the heroic or divine.58 This association is evidence enough. evident from the first extant occurrences of elektron, in Homer’sOdyssey.59When Telemachus visits Menelaus’s The standard Greek word for amber was elektron.52 The palace in Book 4, he is awestruck: “Mark the flashing of derivation of this word is uncertain, although scholars bronze throughout the echoing halls, and the flashing of have suggested that it might have connections with helko, gold, of amber, of silver, and of ivory. Of such sort, meaning “to draw or attract,” or with aleko, meaning “to methinks, is the court of Olympian Zeus within, such ward off evil.”53 The word is certainly associated with 60 54 untold wealth is here; amazement holds me as I look.” elektor, used in the Iliad to mean “the beaming sun,” and is most likely derived from an Indo-European verb It is the flashing of the jewels, more so than the jewels with the root meanings “brilliant” or “to shine.” This themselves, that puts Telemachus in mind of Zeus; the quality of beaming, or reflecting the sun, is also suggested word he uses is steroph—the flash of a lightning bolt. by the Germanic word for amber, glaes or glese, recorded Telemachus’s association of the brightness, the shine, the in some ancient Latin sources as glaesum, the same word brilliance of Menelaus’s palace with divinity seems almost used for glass in this period.55 The Indo-Germanic root for instinctive. this word, ghel, means “lustrous, shimmering, or bright” and gives us words such as glisten, glitter, glow, and Elektron occurs two other times in the Odyssey: once in yellow in English. The current German word for amber, Book 15, when the swineherd Eumaeus, telling the story going back to thirteenth-century Middle Low German, is of his kidnapping to Odysseus, remembers the cunning similarly evocative: Bernstein means “burning stone.”56 Phoenician mariner who turned up at his ancestral home with an eye-catching golden necklace strung with amber When Pliny the Elder or one of his contemporaries pieces.61 In addition, in Book 18, when the suitors vie with admired a valuable piece of amber, the first thing to strike one another in the extravagance of their gifts to Penelope, their eyes would have been the suggestion of fire (imagine Eurymachus’s contribution is “a richly crafted necklace of igneam) or the material’s gentle glow (mollis fulgor). The gold adorned with sun-bright amber” (figure 19).62 amber’s color was certainly evocative—of wine, honey, Another early occurrence of elektron is in the Pseudo- wax, embers, or fire—but was of secondary importance to Hesiodic Shield of Herakles. In this passage, as in Homer’s its shine. This glow had been the defining characteristic of description of Menelaus’s palace, amber takes its place in amber for centuries. a list of rare and precious materials, to dazzling effect: “He took his glittering shield in his hands, nor had anyone ever broken it or damaged it with a blow; it was a marvel 23