Oriental tales have many accounts of magic rings. One of the most elaborate deals with Gyges, a Lydian noble to whom King Candaules, proud of the possession of a beautiful wife, displayed her in her undraped beauty. The resourceful Gyges descended into a chasm of the earth, where he found a brazen horse with a human carcass in its belly. From the body Gyges took a ring which, when he turned the stone inward, made him invisible. Thus fortified, Gyges entered the palace and murdered the king. The widow, Nyssia, married him; he reigned thirty-eight years, from 716 to 678 B.C., with the help of the ring becoming so powerful and so rich that men spoke proverbially of “the wealth of Gyges.” Another ring, as remembered by Chaucer in _The Squire’s Tale_, gave a man the power to understand the language of the birds. The reader may remember that the messenger between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba was a bird that whispered in their ears. We gather such stories from early days literally through a fabulous thousand and one nights. Although jewelry was a preeminent concern of the Egyptians, because they must be adorned not only in this world but in the next, it was a lively preoccupation throughout the Near East, the cradle of civilization. Babylonian and Assyrian tombs yield treasures in splendidly mounted jewels. A description of the goddess Ishtar, descending through the Seven Gates to the ultimate world, pictures her at each gate putting aside a separate jewel, finger rings, toe rings, necklace, earrings, armlet, brooch, girdle: she passes through the final gate in unadorned beauty. Among the jewels of ancient Persia, from the fourth century B.C., is a great necklace of three rows of pearls, almost 500 pearls in all, half of them still well preserved across the flight of twenty-five centuries. _Westward to the Greeks_ There exist some examples of Greek art in early times. A gold and silver brooch in the form of a flower may have been shaped about 1400 B.C. Perhaps 500 years later, by the time of the Trojan War, there were inlays, intaglios, even small plaques of gold with hooks to fit the ear. In the fifth century, when the great dramatists filled the theatres, Greek lapidaries were making filigree and enamels of fruit and flowers—a bit later, of the fair feminine form. By this time, too, the Greeks were copying the designs they saw on, or bought from, Egyptian and Phoenician traders; the sphinx and the scarab appear in Hellenic workmanship.