Having attached in their homelands a fictitious religious value to gold, the early prospectors and miners carried their beliefs and customs with them wherever they went, and these were in time adopted by the peoples with whom they came into contact.
When Columbus crossed the Atlantic he and his followers greatly astonished the unsophisticated natives of the New World by their anxiety to obtain precious metals. They found, to their joy, that “the sands of the mountain streams glittered with particles of gold; [[192]]these”, as Washington Irving says,[3] “the natives would skilfully separate and give to the Spaniards, without expecting a recompense”.
No doubt the early searchers for gold in Africa and Asia met with many peoples who were as much amused and interested, and as helpful, as were the natives of the New World, who welcomed the Spaniards as visitors from the sky.
Gold was the earliest metal worked by man. It was first used in Egypt to fashion imitation sea-shells, and the magical and religious value attached to the shells was transferred to the gold which, in consequence, became “precious” or “holy”.
Copper was the next metal to be worked. It was similarly used for the manufacture of personal ornaments and other sacred objects, being regarded apparently, to begin with, as a variety of gold. But in time—some centuries, it would appear, after copper was first extracted from malachite—some pioneer of a new era began to utilize it as a substitute for flint, and copper knives and other implements were introduced. This discovery of the usefulness of copper had far-reaching effects, and greatly increased the demand for the magical metal. Increasing numbers of miners were employed, and search was made for new copper-mines by enterprising prospectors who, in Egypt, were employed, or, at any rate, protected, by the State. This search had much to do with promoting race movements, and introducing not only new modes of life but new modes of thought into lands situated at great distances from the areas in which these modes of life and thought had origin. The metal-workers were the missionaries of a New Age. In this chapter it will be shown how they reached China. [[193]]
Archæologists are not agreed as to where copper was first used for the manufacture of weapons and implements. Some favour Egypt, and others Mesopotamia. In the former country the useful metal was worked in pre-Dynastic times, that is, before 3500 B.C. or 4500 B.C. “Copper ornaments and objects, found in graves earlier than the middle pre-Dynastic period”, wrote the late Mr. Leonard W. King, “are small and of little practical utility as compared with the beautifully flaked flint knives, daggers, and lances.… At a rather later stage in the pre-Dynastic period, copper dagger-blades and adzes were produced in imitation of flint and stone forms, and these mark the transition to the heavy weapons and tools of copper which, in the early Dynastic period, largely ousted flint and stone implements for practical use. The gradual attainment of skill in the working of copper ore on the part of the early Egyptians had a marked effect on the whole status of their culture. Their improved weapons enabled them by conquest to draw their raw materials from a far more extended area.”[4]
Copper was found in the wadis of Upper Egypt and on the Red Sea coast—in those very areas in which gold was worked for generations before copper was extracted from malachite. At a later period the Pharaohs sent gangs of miners to work the copper-mines in the Sinaitic peninsula. King Semerket, of the early Dynastic age, had men extracting copper in the Wadi Maghara. “His expedition was exposed to the depredations of the wild tribes of Beduin … and he recorded his punishment of them in a relief on the rocks of the Wadi.” There is evidence that at this remote period the Pharaohs “maintained foreign relations with far remote peoples”.[5] A record of a later age (c. 2000 B.C.) affords us a vivid [[194]]glimpse of life in the “Mine-Land”. An official recorded in an inscription that he had been sent there in what he calls the “Evil summer season”. He complained, “It is not the season for going to this Mine-Land.… The highlands are hot in summer, and the mountains brand the skin.” Yet he could boast that “he extracted more copper than he had been ordered to obtain”.[6]
The transition from stone to copper cannot be traced in ancient Babylonia. Sumerian history begins at the seaport Eridu, when that centre of civilization was situated at the head of the Persian Gulf—a fact that suggests the settlement there of seafaring colonists. At the dawn of Sumerian culture, copper tools and weapons had come into use. No metals could be found in the alluvial “plain of Shinar”.
The early Babylonians (Sumerians) had to obtain their supplies of copper from Sinai, Armenia, the Caucasus area, and Persia. It may be that their earliest supplies came from Sinai, and that the battles in that “Mine-Land”, recorded in early Egyptian inscriptions, were fought between rival claimants of the ore from the Nile valley and the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates. One ancient Pharaoh refers in an inscription to his “first occurrence of smiting the Easterners” in Sinai. “This designation”, comments Breasted, “of the event as the ‘first occurrence’ would indicate that it was a customary thing for the kings of the time (First Dynasty, c. 3500 B.C.) to chastise the barbarians.”[7] But were they really “barbarians”? Is it likely that barbarians would be found in such a region, especially in summer? It is more probable that the “Easterners” came from an area in which the demand for copper was as great as it was in Egypt. [[195]]
The regular battles between the ancient “peggers-out” of “claims” in Mine-Land no doubt forced the “Easterners” to search for copper elsewhere. By following the course of the Tigris the Sumerian prospectors were led to the rich mineral area of the Armenian Highlands, and it is of special significance in this connection to find that the earliest Assyrian colonies were founded by Sumerians. Apparently Nineveh (Mosul) had origin as a trading centre at which metal ores were collected and sent southward some time before the Semitic Akkadians obtained control of the northern part of the Babylonian plain.