materialsAmber

said AM-ber

also: succinite · Baltic amber · elektron · kahraba

materialThe Baltic and the Slavic landsScandinavia and the NorthRome and ItalyGreece and the AegeanChinaWestern EuropePoland Lithuania Russia Germany Italy Greece China

Fossilised tree resin. Baltic amber, succinite, is found as irregular nodules in a marine glauconitic sand called blue earth, in Upper Eocene strata of Sambia, and comes from conifers of the family Sciadopityaceae. It is soft — 2 to 2.5 on the Mohs scale — warm to hold, floats in strong brine, smells of pine when rubbed, and burns. Rub it and it picks up chaff, hair and scraps of cloth, which is the property its users noticed first and named it for.

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Arabic 'anbar, from Middle Persian ambar, 'ambergris', via Middle Latin ambar and Middle French ambre; the sense shifted to fossil resin in the Romance languages from the late 13th century
The Greek name elektron, linked to a word meaning 'beaming Sun', gave English electric and electricity, because rubbed amber holds a static charge. Persian kah-ruba, 'straw-snatcher', entered Arabic as kahraba, which is now the Arabic word for electricity. cited

When

c. 330 BCE to now, and older as a worked material still carried cited

Period	classical antiquity to the present
How the date is known	textual — a dated text describes it
Note	Dated from Pytheas, c. 330 BCE, whose account of amber thrown up on the shores of the Isle of Abalus survives through Pliny; Theophrastus discusses amber in the same century. The source says amber has been appreciated since Neolithic times and worked as a gemstone since classical antiquity, without giving a Neolithic year, so the floor here is the earliest date that can be named.

Years are stored astronomically — 1 CE is 1, 1 BCE is 0, 500 BCE is −499 — and printed the way a reader says them. How these dates are made.

What its carriers say it stops

Reported, attributed, not tested here. Each row below is somebody's claim, with their name on it.

Illness — sickness in general, where no cause is named traditionsaid by the European tradition of amber teething and colic necklaces, which argues from succinic acidthe same source records that there is no evidence for the remedy, and that the American Academy of Pediatrics and the FDA warn against the necklaces as choking and strangulation hazards
Harm to a child — harm to an infant or a small child; common across the atlas, though not the largest class in it — see /story/most-of-them-are-for-children/ traditionsaid by parents who put the necklaces on infants

The story

The static charge is not a footnote to amber, it is the reason amber has a reputation. Pliny records that in Syria women made the whorls of their spindles from it and called it harpax, the snatcher, "from the circumstance that it attracts leaves towards it, chaff, and the light fringe of tissues". Persian speakers called it kah-ruba, straw-snatcher. Greek called it elektron. A material that visibly reaches out and takes hold of things is a material people will hang on a child.

It also travelled further than almost anything else in this atlas. There were well-established routes connecting the Baltic with the Mediterranean, known as the Amber Road; Pliny states that the Germans exported amber to Pannonia and the Veneti distributed it onward. The Romans traded for Baltic amber at least as far back as Nero. Italic peoples in the south of Italy worked it, and the National Archaeological Museum of Siritide at Policoro holds important surviving examples. China's first written record of amber is from 200 BCE.

Pliny also got the substance right, against competition. Nicias held that amber was a liquid produced by the rays of the setting sun, sweated out of the soil and thrown up on the shores of Germany. Pliny quotes it and then reports the older, correct Latin view: succinum, from sucus, juice — the resin of a pine.

Tradition holds — amber necklaces are a European remedy for colic and teething pain, on an argument about the analgesic properties of succinic acid. The claim is live and so is the argument against it: there is no evidence that this is an effective remedy or delivery method, and the American Academy of Pediatrics and the US Food and Drug Administration have warned strongly against the necklaces, which present both a choking and a strangulation hazard. Both positions belong on this page.

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Now

Sold everywhere, imitated everywhere. Copal and kauri gum, celluloid and glass have all been passed off as amber; Baltic amber is sometimes coloured artificially and still sold as true amber. What the trade calls black amber is not amber at all, but jet.

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