Riddles about Amber in the Odyssey

Amber is fossilized pine tree resin found mostly in and on the beaches of the Baltic Sea. But so much was found that some sort of catastroph must have occurred to drown so many pine trees.

The Ancient Greek word for amber was ēlektron (ἤλεκτρον). The word is associated with ēlektor (ἤλεκτορ), used in the Iliad to mean the 'beaming', 'dazzling' or 'radiant' sun.

Amber always fascinated the ancients and they imagined that it had some internal fire (imagine igneam) or described the material’s gentle glow (mollis fulgor). The amber’s colour was certainly poetic —of wine, honey, wax, embers, or fire— but was of secondary importance to its glow. 

We find the first (extant) mention of amber in Homer’s Odyssey. When Telemachus visits Menelaus’ palace in Book 4, he is awestruck: “Mark the flashing of bronze throughout the echoing halls, and the flashing of gold, of ēlektron, of silver, and of ivory. Of such sort, methinks, is the court of Olympian Zeus within, such untold wealth is here; amazement holds me as I look.”

It is the flashing of the jewels, more so than the jewels themselves, that puts Telemachus in mind of Zeus; the word he uses is steroph (στεροπή): the flash of a lightning bolt.

The word elektron occurs twice more in the Odyssey: once in Book 15 (lines 455–462), when the swineherd Eumaeus, tells Odysseus the story of his kidnapping. He remembers the cunning Phoenician mariner who turned up at his ancestral home with an eye-catching golden necklace strung with amber pieces. Also, in Book 18 (lines 294–296), when the suitors vie with one another in the extravagance of their gifts to Penelope, Eurymachus’s contribution is “a richly crafted necklace of gold adorned with sun-bright amber”.

[Necklace with a pendant scarab, Italic or Etruscan and Greek, 550–400 B.C. Amber, gold, and carnelian]

The word elektron was also used in antiquity to describe the alloy of silver and gold (modern electrum). The earliest surviving source to discuss both materials is Herodotus. Pliny (Natural History 33.23.80) says, “All gold contains silver in various proportions.… Whenever the proportion is one-fifth, the ore is called electrum.” Some scientists think that elektron was originally used for the resin and then transferred to the metal because the two materials shared certain optical properties. Both were beaming, dazzling, and radiant.

Clearly amber was once abundant. Even in 1701 more than 6 tonnes of amber was used to panel an entire room in the Charlottenburg Palace (Berlin, Prussia), later transferred to the Amber Room in the Catherine Palace (near Saint Petersburg, Russia).

How did amber got to Ancient Greece? As Odysseus lived in the early 12^th century BC, we can imagine caravans slowly making their way from the Mediterranean to the Baltic and back. A more plausible route is via the Volga, as the Vikings did some millennia later. That also suggests that a voyage like that of the Argonauts might well have had a secondary purpose: meet up with traders from the Baltic and transfer amber to their boat. We can even imagine that the fabled Golden Fleece was an amber vase with a depiction of the golden-woolled, winged ram.

The trade network of amber, which reached as far as Egypt, vanished suddenly in the aftermath of the Trojan War. Amber disappeared totally from the market after 1200 BC and was not known again for centuries. Between 1200 BC and 500 BC no amber reached the Mediterranean. The demise of the trade and trade routes of amber coincided with the Dark Age of Greece, suggesting that the Minoan (on the island of Crete) and Mycenaean civilizations (on mainland Greece) had simultaneously crumbled because of prolonged climate change in the region.

[Update 25 August 2021] Amber necklace found in Poland.

An ornate amber necklace was found during the excavation of a cemetery in the Polish village of Przykopka (formerly known as Birkenwalde). The amber necklace was made up of 35 individual hand polished beads, along with a heart-shaped amber pendant. The researchers also found coins from the 18th and 19th century, along with clothing, jewellery, pins, buttons, hairpins, pottery, and animal remains.