Silver has been mined and worked for some six millennia, prized not only for its beauty and rarity, but also for its workability, its ability to take a mirror finish, and even its antibiotic properties. In this book, heavily illustrated with photographs and art from the British Museum, silversmith Philippa Merriman traces the course of silver through human history. She shows how it has been used for everyday items from a musical lyre, many thousands of years old, to a bridal "money hat" that passed down through generations of a Palestinian family, as well as for coins, personal ornament and furnishings, grave decoration, civic regalia, and ritual items.