[329]. Ib. p. 10.
Chalkos, then, must, to begin with, have denoted copper, and indeed it partially preserves that sense in the Homeric poems. The cargo, for example, taken on board at Temesé, in Cyprus, by the Taphian king Mentes,[[330]] must have been of pure copper, the distinctively ‘Cyprian’ metal. The port of Temesé, afterwards Tamassos, be it observed, was a Phœnician establishment, and bore a Phœnician name denoting ‘smelting-house,’ both instructive circumstances as regards the agency by which metallic supplies were transmitted westward.[[331]] Again, when Achilles enumerated with gold and ‘grey iron,’ red chalkos as forming part of his wealth,[[332]] he could have meant nothing but unadulterated copper. The colour-adjective does not recur, but its employment this once strongly supports the inference that the unwrought chalkos, frequently spoken of as stored for future use or barter, was without sensible admixture of tin.
[330]. Odyssey, i. 184.
[331]. Schrader and Jevons, op. cit. p. 196; Buchholz, Homer. Real. Bd. i. Abth. ii. p. 326.
[332]. Iliad, ix. 365.
This inference, however, cannot reasonably be carried further. Homeric armour was altogether of chalkos, and it would be absurd to suppose that the ‘well-greaved Greeks’ went into action copper-clad. This on two grounds. In the first place, archæological research has proved to demonstration that bronze was fully and freely available in the late Mycenæan age, when Homer, there is good reason to believe, flourished. Articles composed of it must have been continually before his eyes and within his grasp. Unless he deliberately elected, which is inconceivable, to exclude from his poems all mention of a material of primary importance to the known arts, his chalkos was a term sufficiently comprehensive to embrace both bronze and copper. In the second place, pure copper could not have played the part assigned to it. Its inadequacy as a material for weapons or armour should promptly have led to its rejection. Assuredly it could neither have sustained, nor been the means of inflicting, the heavy blows and buffets exchanged by the heroes of the Trojan War. The mere fact of the shattering of Menelaus’s sword against the helmet of Paris[[333]] is conclusive as to its having been made of a less yielding substance than copper;[[334]] and the hardening process, by sudden cooling, imagined with the view to removing the difficulty, has been pronounced, on the authority of experts, impracticable.[[335]] The rigidity and occasional brittleness of the Homeric chalkos was imparted to it, we may be quite sure, by the tin mixed with it.
[333]. Iliad, iii. 363.
[334]. Riedenauer, Handwerk und Handwerker, p. 103.
[335]. Blümner, Technologie, Bd. iv. p. 51.
Moreover, it is incredible that the Homeric Greeks, although acquainted with iron, had no share in the bronze-culture flourishing, then and previously, along the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. The persistence, anywhere in that region, of so late, and so extraordinarily developed a copper age, would indeed be a glaring anomaly. Already,[[336]] in the third millennium B.C., bronze tools were used in Egypt; and under the name zabar, whence the Arabic zifr, bronze was fabricated by Sumero-Accadian metallurgists at the very outset of Mesopotamian civilisation.[[337]] It was, in fact, probably from Mesopotamia that knowledge of the art and its attendant advantages was carried westward by Sidonian traffickers. Customers, then, who, like the Achæans, procured from them plentiful supplies of copper, and a smaller quantity of tin, could not long have remained ignorant of the vast superiority of their alloyed over their separate condition. The conclusion is inevitable that chalkos, like the corresponding Hebrew term nechosheth, and the Egyptian chomt, was a word of some elasticity of meaning, designating ordinarily bronze, but occasionally copper. The translation, it need hardly be said, of any of the three by the English brass involves a gross error. Copper was not systematically alloyed with zinc until about the second century B.C.[[338]]