pass through it in some active sense. In Greece and Italy, songs, healing words, spoken prayers, and incantations accompanied such amulets. Roy Kotansky traces the use of written incantations and symbols with amulets back to the rituals of Egypt and the Near East and notes that these “may have been transmitted to Ancient Greece and Italy by traditional folk means, traders, or itinerant medicine men or women.”162 There is a relative paucity of information in Greek and Latin literature about amulets and their use, as noted above, and much of the archaeological evidence awaits study. However, what does exist is enlightening, as recent scholarship shows. Some well-known examples indicate how pervasive was the use of “tied-on” substances: Pericles, sick with the plague, was prodded into wearing an amulet around his neck. Socrates in Plato’s Republic lists amulets and incantations as among the techniques used to heal the sick.163 More is known about Egyptian and Near Eastern amulets, from both written sources and archaeological evidence. Such information may be useful in coming to conclusions about early Greek and Italian use of amulets, but despite the similarities, it would be a mistake to assume that all such usage had Oriental prototypes. Much less is documented about northern European practice, and yet many subjects of the figured amber pendants found in Italy have Baltic precedents that are thousands of years older: standing human figures Figure 35 Female Holding a Child (Kourotrophos), Etruscan, 600-550 B.C. (figure 35), faces, and detached heads, bears, and hoofed Amber, H: 13 cm (51⁄8 in.), W: 4.5 cm (13⁄4 in.), D: 1.8 cm (7⁄10 in.). Los Angeles, J. animals.164 Paul Getty Museum, 77.AO.84. Gift of Gordon McLendon. See cat. no. 1. From the point of view of amber amulet usage in Italy, seven large ambers, four of which are figured—two female heads and two satyrs—found in Tomb 48 at Ripacandida are of great interest.165 Angelo Bottini has suggested that the objects were not part of a necklace but may have been put inside a pouch or strung together to form a chaplet or a sort of rosary.166 A chaplet, or circlet, with bulla-shaped pendants held by the figure of Calaina (Galene) on a fourth-century Etruscan mirror (see figure 33) is an unusual ornament in Classical art. In Assyrian and Neo-Assyrian art, a goddess carries a similar chaplet, or string of beads, as an attribute.167 Amuletic pouches, containing all sorts of materials and objects, remained popular throughout Italy until the modern era. At the end of the nineteenth century, Giuseppe Bellucci collected and studied hundreds of such protective bags, or sacchettini, many of great age.168 Using terms such as necklace, armlet, collar, pectoral, or girdle for worked amber objects minimizes their ties to older amuletic traditions. There is a long history of such strings of amulets (some are seals) throughout Europe, in Amber Medicine, Amber Amulets 51