วัสดุเงิน (โลหะเงิน)Silver

The oldest surviving text of the Hebrew Bible is an amulet, and it is silver. In 1979 two tiny silver scrolls came out of a Judahite burial chamber at Ketef Hinnom, southwest of Jerusalem's Old City, inscribed with portions of the Priestly Blessing from Numbers and apparently worn as amulets. They date to the late seventh or early sixth century BCE. Unrolling them without destroying them took three years, and they are now in the Israel Museum.

That is the metal's characteristic use: a sheet, incised with a needle, rolled up, and carried in a tube. Flat metal amulets of silver, gold, copper and lead were popular in late antiquity across Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, Anatolia and Iran — rolled and placed in a metal container with loops for a cord, and covered with incantation formulae and the names of God, mostly in Aramaic and Hebrew. Jewish amulet practice, which will not make images, puts the divine name on parchment or on metal, and the metal is usually silver.

The metal also carries claims of its own. The hamsa was most commonly carved in jet or formed from silver, a metal held to represent purity and to hold power. The hirz, another Egyptian amulet against the evil eye, is a silver box holding verses of the Qur'an. The Neapolitan cimaruta is commonly silver, and the cornicello is cut from gold or silver as often as from coral; silver, in that reading, belongs to Luna. In Europe silver turns up as a weapon: folklore holds that a bullet cast from silver is the only thing effective against a werewolf or a witch, and the metal is also credited with detecting poison and easing passage into the realm of the fairies.

Inference — silver sits between gold and iron in every sense that matters to a charm. It survives in the ground where iron does not, and it costs less than gold, which is why so much of the world's amulet stock is silver — it is the most expensive metal an ordinary household will put on a child.

Still the default metal of the amulet trades from Morocco to Nepal. The silver jewellery now identified with the Navajo and other peoples of the American Southwest is dated by writers on turquoise to around 1880 and described as a modern development following European contact — a reminder that a material can be old and the craft made from it recent.