materialsGold

also: aurum

materialAncient EgyptMesopotamiaRome and ItalyThe BalkansBritain and IrelandChinaBulgaria Egypt Iraq Italy United Kingdom China Mexico

A bright yellow metal, dense at 19.3 grams per cubic centimetre, soft, and so malleable that a single gram beats out into a sheet a metre square. It occurs native, usually in solid solution with silver. It does not corrode and it does not tarnish, which is the property every tradition that uses it eventually says something about.

cited

When

5th millennium BCE to now still carried cited

Period	Chalcolithic to the present
How the date is known	excavated — dug up in a dated context
Note	Dated from the Varna Necropolis gold, described as the oldest gold artefacts in the world and placed in the fifth millennium BCE. The floor is set at the start of that millennium because the source gives no closer year.

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.

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/ citedsaid by Roman parents, who hung a bulla on a boy nine days after birth and a lunula on a girl
The evil eye — harm carried by a look, often an admiring one citedsaid by Roman use as summarised by Isidore of Seville and by writers on Roman dress
Illness — sickness in general, where no cause is named citedsaid by the givers of milagros, votive charms made in gold where a family can afford gold

The story

Gold is the earliest metal on the human record. Small quantities appear in Spanish caves from around 40,000 BCE; the oldest gold artefacts in the world come from the Varna Necropolis in Bulgaria, fifth millennium BCE — the same cemetery that produced the first faceted carnelian beads. Egyptian and Mesopotamian gold objects follow in the fourth millennium BCE.

In amulets, gold's job is usually to say who is wearing it. A Roman boy wore a bulla, a locket-like pouch with a protective amulet inside, from nine days after birth until he put on the toga of manhood. Upper-class families could afford bullae of gold or covered in gold foil; everyone else used lead, leather and cloth. The girls' equivalent is defined by Isidore of Seville: "Lunulae are female ornaments in the likeness of the moon, little hanging gold bullae." Plautus has Epidicus ask a girl, "Don't you remember my bringing you a gold lunula on your birthday, and a little gold ring for your finger?" The same charm, on two children, in two price brackets.

Elsewhere gold is one option in a list. Egyptian amulets were made of faience above all, but also of stone, metal, bone, wood and gold. Late antique sheet amulets from Palestine and Syria were rolled from silver, gold, copper and lead. Milagros, the Latin American votive charms, are made from gold, silver, tin, lead, wood, bone or wax, depending on local custom and on what the person can spend. Part of the Thetford treasure in Norfolk is a gold box made to hang round the neck, found to contain sulphur for its evil-repelling qualities.

Gold is also the benchmark other materials are measured against, and sometimes beaten by. Jade reaching the Chinese court from Khotan is described as having status-value exceeding that of gold or silver. In the Han jade burial suits the gold is demoted to thread: emperors' suits were sewn with gold wire, princes and marquises with silver, their children with copper, lesser aristocrats with silk. Inference — a material hierarchy written into a burial regulation is the clearest statement in this atlas that what a charm is made of is a claim about the person in it.

cited

Now

Gold amulets are sold everywhere amulets are sold, and are the class of charm most likely to be melted rather than kept — which is a survival bias running the opposite way to faience. The Aztecs, the gold literature notes, called the metal literally "god excrement".

inference