While some writers, under this story, connect Prometheus with the first ring, Pliny still says that the inventor of it is not known, and observes that it was used by the Babylonians, Chaldeans, Persians and Greeks, although, as he thinks, the latter were unacquainted with it at the time of the Trojan war, as Homer does not mention it.[9] It has however been said that Dschemid, who made known the solar year, introduced the use of the ring.[10] Touching Pliny’s notion of the antiquity of rings, there is, in Southey’s “Commonplace Book,” (second series,[11]) the following quotation from “Treasurie of Auncient and Moderne Times,” (1619:) “But the good olde man Plinie cannot overreach us with his idle arguments and conjectures, for we read in Genesis that Joseph, who lived above five hundred yeares before the warres of Troy, having expounded the dreame of Pharaoh, king of Ægypt, was, by the sayde prince, made superintendent over his kingdom, and for his safer possession in that estate, he took off his ring from his hand and put it upon Joseph’s hand.” ... “In Moses’s time, which was more than foure hundred yeares before Troy warres, wee find rings to be then in use; for we reade that they were comprehended in the ornaments which Aaron the high priest should weare, and they of his posteritie afterward, as also it was avouched by Josephus. Whereby appeareth plainly, that the use of rings was much more ancient than Plinie reporteth them in his conjectures: but as he was a Pagan, and ignorant in sacred writings, so it is no marvell if these things went beyond his knowledge.” It is pretended that seal-rings were an invention of the Lacedemonians, who, not content with locking their coffers, added a seal; for which purpose they made use of worm-eaten wood, with which they impressed wax or soft wood; and after this they learned to engrave seals.[12] § 5. Cylinders, squares and pyramids were forms used for seals prior to the adoption of ring-seals.[13] These settled with the Greeks into the scarabæus or beetle, that is to say, a stone something like the half of a walnut, with its convexity wrought into the form of a beetle, while the flat under surface contained the inscription for the seal. The Greeks retained this derivable form until they thought of dispensing with the body of the beetle, only preserving for the inscription the flat oval which the base presented, and which they ultimately set in rings. This shows how ring-seals came into form. Many of the Egyptian and other ring-seals are on swivel, and we are of opinion that the idea of this convenient form originated with the perforated cylindrical and other seals, which were, with a string passed through them, worn around the neck or from the wrist.[14]