Amber's trade history is unusually well documented for a prehistoric commodity, because its main source, the Baltic coast, is so far from the Mediterranean societies that prized it that archaeologists can trace the overland and river routes amber took to reach them by mapping where worked Baltic amber turns up in the burial goods of intermediate cultures. Amber beads from the Baltic have been found in Mycenaean Greek graves, in Etruscan tombs, and as far south as Egypt, evidence of exchange networks running across the whole of Bronze Age and Iron Age Europe centuries before any written account of the trade survives.
The Greeks called it elektron, and the word's second life as the root of "electricity" traces directly back to a property the ancients had already noticed and found strange: rubbed amber attracts light objects such as straw or feathers, a static effect that had no accepted explanation until the study of electricity itself began in the early modern period.
Pliny the Elder devotes a substantial passage of the Naturalis Historia to succinum, the Roman name for amber, and settles the essential point correctly against several competing ancient theories: it is the hardened resin of a tree. He also records that an equestrian sent north by Nero to procure amber for the gladiatorial games returned from the Baltic coast with so much of it that the nets restraining the arena's animals were studded with the material, a detail that gives a rare sense of the volume the trade could move when a Roman emperor wanted it moved.