In tracing the history of gold through the ages, this beautiful book showcases the multifarious uses to which the precious metal has been put. Drawing on her own long experience investigating the art and science of metallurgy, Susan La Niece guides readers through the rich history of gold. In detailed images and descriptive text, her book shows us gold over the millennia as coinage, jewelry and ornamentation, high-status vessels, and grave goods; as gifts of distinction, and as radiant symbols in rituals of magic and worship.

Following a glimmering trail through distant times and places, Gold takes us to cultures as disparate as the Mughals of India, the Anglo-Saxons of Britain, and the pre-Hispanic civilizations of the New World. It considers the work of alchemists and goldsmiths, the myths and the legends, the fakes and fine art. And, in the end, it offers a fittingly lavish and deeply informed picture of gold in all its practical, figurative, commercial, artistic, and historical facets.

This is a study of the twelve small gold lamellae from Crete that were tokens for entrance into a golden afterlife: the deceased who were buried or cremated with them believed that they had 'earned Paradise.' The lamellae are placed within the context of a small corpus of similar texts, and published with extensive commentary on their topography, lettering and engraving, dialect and orthography, meter, chronology, and usage. The texts reveal a hieros logos whose poetics and rituals are not much different from Homeric rhapsodizing and prophetic discourses. Cretan contexts, both literary and archaeological, are also brought to bear on these incised objects and on the burial custom involved. Finally, this work adduces parallels to the texts on the lamellae from the Byzantine period and modern Greece to illuminate the everlasting and persistent human quest for 'earning Paradise.'