ABSTRACT
Much less familiar among scholars, though in fact as common, are late antique amulets in glass, either oval intaglios or stamped ‘cameo’ pendants. Slightly broader in their pattern of distribution and slightly earlier in date than the metal and mineral Holy Riders, they are much more varied in their imagery and much less thoroughly magical, relying (when they are amuletic at all) mostly on solar images, on some fairly tepid religious power symbols, such as the Chrismon, and on the sympathetic magic of Old Testament salvation historiolae, such as the Sacri ce of Isaac. Much the same is true of cast-lead pendant amulets, which because they were simple, impersonal and ‘mass-produced’, probably serviced similar consumer needs. Whatever ndspot evidence exists points again towards the eastern Mediterranean, but although Old and New Testament salvation imagery, such as the Raising of Lazarus, appears in this medium and format as well, there is something much more speci cally amuletic about lead pendants than about their glass counterparts. Moreover, while glass was by the sixth century disappearing as a medium for amulets, lead seems only then to have been coming into its own and it continued well beyond late antiquity.
