The Legend of Amber

I recently came across the legend of Amber which I thought I would share:

According to legend, Phaeton was the son of the sun. Every day he watched his father driving his chariot across the heavens, and every day he begged to have a go. One day he had his chance. His seven sisters helped to harness the horses and he set out with all the confidence of a pampered teenager. But tragedy struck, as it always does in ancient myths. The joyrider soon lost control and the chariot veered off course. It seemed that the world would be destroyed, but Zeus, the king of gods, sent a thunderbolt to kill the boy and stop the damage. Phaeton's body came to earth beside a north-flowing river, which the barbarian tribes called the Eridanus. As punishment for helping him, his sisters were turned into black poplars. As they wept over the fate of their beautiful, arrogant brother, their tears fell into the river and became amber.

From Jewels, A secret history by Victoria Finlay, Random House, 2007

Now if you want to know the real story of amber, you will have to find out for yourself. :-)

And as a bonus:

The Greeks called amber elektron meaning "the sun", because it comes in all the colours of the sun, bright yellow to sunset red, and because when it is rubbed, it attracts lint and dried grass to it, and creates sparks of light. Later, the English physician William Gilbert noticed that amber shared this quality of attraction with several other substances, including tourmaline, glass, jet, sealing wax, sulfur, and resin, and in 1600 he named the phenomenon "electricity" after the Greek name for amber.