Myrina Rings

Myrina rings take their name from one of the most formidable figures in the mythology of the ancient Mediterranean: Myrina, the Amazon queen whose military campaigns were described by the ancient historian Diodorus Siculus as spanning the entire known world. Unlike the more famous Amazonian figures who appear in the context of Greek heroic myth, Hippolyte, Penthesilea, Antiope, Myrina’s story is one of independent conquest and empire: she led an army of Amazon warriors from Libya across Egypt, through Arabia and Persia, into Asia Minor, founding cities and subjugating kingdoms in a campaign that predated the Trojan War in the mythological timeline.

The cities that bore Myrina’s name endured for centuries after the myths that explained their founding had been largely forgotten. On the island of Lemnos, the city of Myrina preserved her memory into the Roman period. On the coast of the Troad, near ancient Troy, another Myrina marked the westernmost extent of her campaign. These were not symbolic foundations but real places, their names carrying the trace of a tradition, however mythologized, of powerful women who moved through the ancient world not as its margins but as its makers.

The Friszman MD Myrina ring embodies this quality of boundary and definition. A wide band in 18-karat gold is bordered on its upper and lower edges by two smooth, high-polished rails, clean architectural lines that frame and contain the central field. Between these rails, a matte surface carries raised organic accent forms distributed around the full circumference: script-like, flame-like marks that catch the light and suggest a language on the verge of legibility, an inscription that encodes something too important to be left unsaid but too sacred to be read by everyone.

The motif of the inscribed ring runs deep in the mythological and archaeological imagination. In Norse tradition, the ring Draupnir, forged by the dwarves Brokkr and Sindri for Odin, dripped eight rings of equal weight every ninth night, an endlessly self-generating treasure whose value was not material but symbolic: the ring as the carrier of authority, of covenant, of the promise that outlasts the person who made it. In ancient Mesopotamia, cylinder seals, whose impressions in clay served as personal signatures, property marks, and divine invocations, were often worn as rings or pendants, their engraved surfaces a perpetual connection between the wearer and the divine order they invoked. The marks on the Myrina band share this formal logic: not decoration but declaration.

In Celtic tradition, the great gold torques and armlets of the La Tène period carried their symbolic content in exactly this way, in the texture and patterning of their surfaces rather than in any figurative imagery. The marks did not need to be read to be understood: their presence on the metal was sufficient, their energy communicated through proximity, through the pressure of the gold against the skin. The Myrina ring operates in this same register, a piece whose power is felt before it is analyzed, whose form communicates something that precedes language.

Myrina is offered in three individual metals, 18-karat yellow gold, rose gold, and white gold, and in three two-metal pairings: yellow and rose gold, yellow and white gold, and white and rose gold. The paired versions are styled to complement each other as stacking rings, the shared architectural structure creating a visual conversation between two registers of color. Made to order in São Paulo, Brazil, using precision 3D modeling and hand-finishing, each Myrina ring is sized to specification using Friszman MD’s inner diameter measurement system.