วัสดุอำพันAmber

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.

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.