in other cases, qualities that make them lethal to the user, much like the One Ring in J.R.R. Tolkien's saga.

Not many of these items have survived down to our time, but we know that Alexander the Great was particularly fond of an unusual opal which kept him from being wounded in battle. Upon embarking on his conquest of the Persian Empire, the Macedonian king (whose own armor would become talismanic over the centuries, as mentioned earlier) made a quick stop at the ruins of Troy to secure a sacred shield, which had belonged to one of the heroes of Homeric legend, in an effort to bolster his invulnerability an extra notch. But neither the exotic opal nor the ancient shield were much help when an arrow pierced Alexander'slungs while storming the walls of a city in the Punjab.

Rings occupy a privileged position among all articles of jewelry: Apollonius of Tyana received a ring of amber from one of the initiates in the fabled city of Iarchas somewhere in Central Asia (or another dimension?). The amber stone allegedly kept its wearer from harm and enabled him or her to have foreknowledge of any dangers ahead--a faculty that the legendary Apollonius employed more than once. Charlemagne possessed an unusual ring whose stone was supposed to preserve all of a warlord's conquests. Naturally, this amulet quickly taken by the Frankish monarch's son Lewis and in turn squabbled over by Charlemagne's nephews, who divided up their grandfather's empire.

But the powers ascribed to these adornments mainly reflect the wishes of