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The Ancient Greek word electron was also used to describe first a natural then a man-made alloy of gold and silver, a precious amalgam and medium of exchange in rare metal bullion used to pioneer coinage in the Mediterranean world. Amber was poeticized in myth as the congealed tears of the mourning sisters of Phaethon, the sun’s ephemeral charioteer whose name conveyed “shining”.

Ancient Greeks also connected this word for amber to elector, sounding as Ä“lectōr ( ἠλέκτωρ), for the “beaming sun” and this derived word was also related to fire. Similar to Greek ideas, amber was often thought in some folklore to be the distillation of sunlight and possibly a protective amulet against certain ailments or evils. Its metaphysical or poetic associations are fascinating. It was as valuable as other ‘gems’ and highly prized in antiquity for its translucent, gold-like color and found in early Etruscan tombs of the late 8 th century BC in quantity. Amber was a rare and beautiful commodity, traded from the Baltic north to the Mediterranean south. Amber was valued in antiquity although its sources were either unknown according to Theophrastus ( On Stones 29) or possibly found at the Celtic, Western margin of the world according to Herodotus ( History 3.115). In Ancient Greek electron, sounding as Ä“lektron ( ἤλεκτρον) was a word used for amber, the precious fossil resin from ancient trees. While some of these old words, either commonplace like “star” and “myth”, or not so common like “emery”, have their derivations in the Bronze Age or Classical world millennia past, other words like “electron” – and the Latin version in electrum – also have old and venerable stories that have preserved many ancient details, like primeval insects caught in amber. Historical linguistics often surprises us about how old are some of the words we use today, especially when we might expect they were coined only within the last century or so. Baltic amber with preserved insect (work of Baltic-amber-beetle, image courtesy of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License)