ABSTRACT
When and where and why men first began to wear rings cannot be said, and the fundamental ideas which they held about them can only be guessed at. They probably associated the ring with the solar disk and believed that it therefore possessed strength and power and continuity and wore it as an Amulet. Whether made of metal or stone matters little, but if made of gold or some semiprecious stone, which was credited by them with the possession of some magical property, its invisible power would be increased. The Sun-god Shamash represented on the famous “Sun-god Tablet” in the British Museum holds a ring and a staff, and in the well-known relief on which Marduk is seen in royal attire and armed as a warrior, he holds a ring and a staff in his left hand. We thus see that the ideas of divinity, sovereignty, strength, power, and protection were associated with the ring in very early times, and long before it was turned into a signet of seal or had a bezel attached to it. The gods themselves may have needed a ring as an amulet, and in any case it represented their authority and dignity, and was a part of their regalia. The Greek mythologists invented a fable to account for the origin of the finger-ring. Jove, upon loosing the Titan Prometheus from the bonds to which he had been condemned to eternity, obliged him as a perpetual penance, as an equivalent to his original sentence, to wear for ever upon his finger a link of the chain enchased with a fragment of the Caucasian rock of torture. Thus ornamented, Catullus introduces him at the Wedding of Peleus (1. 295).
“Came wise Prometheus; on his hand he wore The slender symbol of his doom of yore.”
(See C. W. King, Engraved Gems, p. 12.)