[317]. Much, Die Kupferzeit, p. 41.
Silver[[318]] was, at the outset, a still rarer substance than gold. Not that there is really less of it. The ocean alone is estimated to contain nearly ten thousand million tons, and the mines yielding it, though few, are rich. But it occurs less obviously, and is less easy to obtain pure. Accordingly, in some very early Egyptian inscriptions, silver, by heading the list of metals, claims a supremacy over them which proved short-lived. It terminated for ever with the scarcity that had produced it, when the Phœnicians began to pour the flood of Spanish silver into the markets and treasure-chambers of the East. Armenia constituted another tolerably copious source of supply; and it was in this quarter that Homer located the ‘birthplace of silver.’[[319]] Alybé, on the coast of the Euxine east of Paphlagonia, whence the Halizonians came to Troy, was identified by Strabo with Chalybe, a famous mining district.[[320]] The people there, indeed, as Xenophon recorded, lived mostly by digging iron; and their name was preserved in the Greek chalups, steel, and survives with ourselves in chalybeate waters. The district has, however, in modern times, again become known as argentiferous. The Homeric tradition receives countenance from the discovery, in the neighbourhood of Tripoli, of antique, half obliterated silver-workings; and from the existence, not far off, of a ‘Silver-town’ (Gunnish-kana), and a ‘Silver-mountain’ (Gunnish-dagh), whence a large tribute in silver still flowed, a few years ago, into the leaky coffers of Turkey.[[321]]
[318]. Blümner, Technologie der Gewerbe, Bd. iv. pp. 28-32.
[319]. Iliad, ii. 857.
[320]. Geog. xii. 3.
[321]. Rougemont, L’Âge de Bronze, p. 169; Riedenauer, Handwerk und Handwerker, p. 101.
The word silver (Gothic, silubr) has even been conjecturally associated with the Homeric Alybé;[[322]] while other philologists prefer to regard it as equivalent to the Assyrian sarpu.[[323]] All that is certain is the absence of a general Aryan name for the metal, showing that the Aryans collectively made no acquaintance with it. Thus, the Greek arguros and the Latin argentum, although closely related, are really different words. That is to say, they were formed independently from the common root, ark, to shine, modified into arg, white. Its whiteness, in fact, has supplied the designations of this metal in all parts of the world. Silver is the ‘white iron’ of the Kaffirs, the ‘white gold’ of the Afghans, the ‘white copper’ of the Vedic Indians; and the antique Accadians and Egyptians defined it by the same obvious quality.[[324]] The Greek arguros is, then, a comparatively late word, formed, perhaps, after the Achæan tribes were already settled in their Hellenic home, when their first supplies of silver began to come in from Pontic Asia Minor.
[322]. Hehn, Wanderings of Plants, p. 443.
[323]. Taylor, Origin of the Aryans, p. 143.
[324]. Schrader and Jevons, Antiquities of the Aryans, pp. 154, 180-82.