This isn’t from Lord of the Rings, but it comes close. The front of this gold ring is inscribed in Greek with the words, “Havriknidas [or perhaps Aphrikanidas] dedicated [this ring] to the white-armed goddess, Hera.” In Greek mythology, Hera is the goddess of women, marriage, family, and childbirth.
Signs of considerable wear on the ring’s outer edge indicate that it had been worn for a long time before the inscription was added.
In the 500s BC, the way Greek letters were written differed significantly from city to city. The inscription on this ring uses the script of Argos, a city in southern Greece, and represents the earliest form of the Argive alphabet, suggesting a date in the early to mid-6th century B.C.
TheMask of Agamemnon is an artifact discovered at Mycenae in 1876 by Heinrich Schliemann. The artifact is a funeral mask crafted in gold, and was found over the face of a body located in aburial shaft, designated Grave V, at the site “Grave Circle A, Mycenae”. Schliemann believed that he had discovered the body of the legendary Greek leader Agamemnon, but modern archaeological research suggests that the mask is from 1550–1500 BC, earlier than the life of Agamemnon, as tradition regards it. The mask is currently displayed in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.
