Ambergris
In several medieval sources — especially within the Arabic pharmacological and encyclopedic traditions — ambergris(‘anbar) was at times misread or conflated with yellow amber, the fossilized tree resin known in Greek as ēlektron. This confusion appears in certain medical and alchemical recipes recorded by writers such as al-Kindī, al-Bīrūnī, and later compilers of materia medica, where the term ‘anbar could drift between meanings depending on the scribe, the region, or the translator. The entanglement was made easier by the simple fact that both substances were encountered on the margins of the sea: ambergris as a floating marine secretion cast ashore by tides, and amber as a “stone that burns,” often collected from beaches of the Baltic and reworked into trade networks reaching the Islamic world.
Although materially unrelated, the two ambers shared an ambiguous coastal origin. Ambergris, waxy and aromatic, is less dense than water and thus travels long distances across the ocean before washing up. Fossil amber, on the other hand, is too dense to float, though still lighter than most stones, leading beachcombers to discover it mixed with driftwood and sea debris. This overlapping shoreline ecology allowed their identities to blur in textual transmission. In some manuscripts, the recipes calling for the fragrant, marine-born grey amber were later interpreted as requiring the golden fossil resin — a slippage that reveals how materials were understood not only through their physical properties but also through the poetic and empirical imaginaries of the coast.