It is of course quite possible that in a region where gold is not native and copper is, the latter may have been the first metal known to the aboriginal inhabitants. This can be well illustrated from the case of iron and copper in Central Africa. The negroes never had a copper or bronze age, but passed directly into the iron age, for the very sufficient reason that no native copper was found in their country, and consequently they had no metal suited for implements until they had learned to smelt iron. Gold of course on the other hand was known to them from the most remote period. Finally, from a famous modern occurrence we may come to the general conclusion that wherever gold is a natural product of the soil there it has been the first metal to come under the observation of man. The great gold-field of California was first discovered on a memorable Sunday morning, when the eye of a lounger who was smoking his pipe by the side of Captain Sutter’s millrace happened to light on some glittering body in the sandy bottom of the stream. This was the first scrap of gold found in California, and whilst that fertile land has produced many natural treasures besides gold within the scarcely more than forty years which have since elapsed, its gold it will be observed was the earliest of its metals, both from the nature of its deposit and from the brilliancy of its colour, to attract the attention of man. In certain parts of Southern Europe, notably parts of Southern Italy and Southern Greece, where copper is found but not gold, copper perhaps may have been known before gold, and certainly before silver. It will be important to bear this in mind with reference to a stage in our future arguments.
That silver came under men’s notice at a later time than either gold or copper can be put beyond doubt by historical evidence. In the Rig Veda, where gold (heranya) is already well known and likewise copper (for there can be no doubt that the ayas of the Veda, Lat. aes, means copper), silver is entirely unknown; the word rayatam, which in later Sanskrit means silver, does indeed occur, but only as an adjective applied to a horse and meaning bright. Again, we know as a matter of fact that it was only at a comparatively late period that the famous silver mines of Laurium in Attica were developed. At least Plutarch (Solon, ch. 16) tells us that, owing to the scarcity of silver coin, Solon reduced the amount of the fines levied and also of the rewards for killing a wolf or wolf-cub, the former to five drachms, the latter to one drachm, the rewards representing the value of a cow and a sheep respectively. If they had already learned to work that “well of silver, the treasure-house of their land,” in the time of Solon (596 B.C.), there certainly could have been no such dearth of silver. Finally let us take a comparatively modern case, that of the Aztecs of Mexico. When the Spanish conquerors reckoned up their great tale of treasures found in the royal palace, whilst the gold amounted to the large sum of pesos de oro 162000 lbs., the silver and silver vessels only weighed the small sum of 500 marks[90]. Yet this was in the country that is now known as the richest silver-producing region that the world has ever seen.
We thus find a people in a highly advanced state of civilization, who had invented a calendar, had devised a system of picture-writing, who had actually a currency in gold-dust, as we have found, and who were skilled and artistic craftsmen in gold, and yet who were scarcely able to make the slightest use of the silver, with which almost every crevice in their native hills was charged.
We may thus with safety rest in the conclusion that silver only comes into use at a stage always and probably much later than gold.
We have been thus led to the conclusion that gold is known to man at a far earlier stage than silver; furthermore that copper is also prior in discovery and use to silver owing to its natural form of deposit, and that, although in a region where gold does not exist, copper may have been the first of the metals to come under human notice, yet wherever gold-bearing strata are found, there is a great probability that gold was the first metal known. Schrader (op. cit. p. 174) has discussed the evidence from the Linguistic Palaeontological point of view, and whilst much of what he says is interesting, there are some points in his conclusions which shake one’s faith in the infallibility of the Linguistic method for determining disputed points in archaeology. Gold he considers was known to the Egyptians from the remotest times, and so also to the Semites of Asia. As gold is found in abundance in the tombs of Mycenae (circ. B.C. 1400) he considers that just about that time the Greeks had acquired a knowledge of gold from the Phoenicians. The Greek Chrysos (χρυσος), gold, is derived, according to many scholars, from the Phoenician equivalent for charutz, the Hebrew name for the same metal.
There is plainly no relationship between the Egyptian name Nub and the Semitic appellation. The question, however, may arise as to whether, even granting that chrysos is derived from chârûz, it follows that the Greeks had no knowledge of gold prior to their contact with the Phoenicians. It is the skilful manufacture of a metal into beautiful and useful articles which gives it its real value. Hence arises the high esteem in which the cunning workman is held in early times. In Homer he is ranked along with the prophet, a sufficient proof in itself of the great importance attached to his functions. Again, in the Homeric Poems all articles of gold and silver of especially fine workmanship, if they are not the work of the divine smith Hephaestus himself, are the productions of the Sidonian craftsmen. The priest Maron gave Odysseus, amongst other presents, seven talents of well-wrought gold. Whether this took the form simply of rings we cannot tell, but plainly the value of the gift is enhanced by the epithet. From these considerations it seems not unreasonable to suppose that the Greeks, although possessing a name of their own for gold, may have adopted a Phoenician name, because they obtained the fine-wrought ornaments of that metal which they prized so highly from the Semite traders.
If any one thinks that this is a mere suggestion unsupported by analogy, my answer is not far to seek. The Albanian word for gold is φλjορι[91], so called because the first coined gold moneys of the middle ages with which they became acquainted were those of Florence. Now I think Dr Schrader will hardly maintain that the Albanians were unacquainted with gold as a metal until sometime in the mediaeval period they first obtained it from the Florentines. What took place in the case of the Albanians may have taken place again and again at earlier periods. A rude nation already acquainted with a certain metal receives by trade from a more advanced people the same metal wrought into various shapes and forms for personal decoration or use, and along with the superior articles it takes over the name by which the makers of those objects of metal described them.
These considerations well serve to show how unsafe is the basis afforded by Linguistic Palaeontology alone on which to build any theory of ethnical development. Let us now take another case where Schrader and his followers dogmatize without the slightest suspicion that the facts of recorded history may step in and rudely upset their conclusions. Schrader[92] holds that the Kelts were not acquainted with gold until their invasion of Italy in the beginning of the 4th cent. B.C. His argument is that the Celtic word for gold (Irish or, Cymric awr) is a loan-word from the Latin aurum. As the Sabine form of the latter is ausum, and the change of s to r did not take place in Latin until the fifth century B.C., and as the change of primitive s into r does not take place in the Keltic languages, he infers that it was only after the change in the form of the word had taken place in Latin that the Gauls became acquainted with the metal. Yet who will, on reflection, maintain that the Gauls had not already learned the use of gold from the Etruscans with whom they had been in contact long before they ever reached the Allia or sacked Rome? The Italian dialects were still employing the form of the word with s. Why should the Gauls have taken the form of the word with which they must have come least in contact in their invasion of Italy in preference to that used amongst the other Italians? Finally comes the irresistible evidence of Polybius that when the Gauls invaded Italy their only possessions consisted of their cattle and an abundance of gold ornaments, both of which could be easily transported from place to place[93].
Again, we can argue forcibly that it is contrary to all experience for primitive peoples to suddenly exhibit so strong a predilection for metals, or objects of which they have not had previous knowledge, as the Gauls showed in their rapacious demands that the ransom of Rome should be in gold. The legend that Brennus threw his sword into the scales, and ordered them to make up its weight in addition to the stipulated sum, shows, if it is true, that the Gauls were well acquainted with the art of weighing, which would be only gained from a long knowledge of the precious metals. The solution of the difficulty involved in the Keltic or can be readily found. The Iberians in Spain had long been skilled in the working and use of the precious metals. Tradition told how Colaeus of Samos, the first of the Greeks who ever sailed to Spain, brought back a fabulous amount of precious metal, and that the Phoenicians when they first traded in that region found silver so plentiful that in their greed for gain, when the ship could hold no more, they replaced their anchors by others made of that metal. The Phocaeans had traded with Iberia and Gaul from the end of the 7th century, Massalia had been founded by this bold people about 600 B.C. Are we to suppose that in all those centuries when the Kelts are in constant contact with the Iberians, and when already all Keltike, Helvetia, Northern Italy and even perhaps ‘the remote Britanni,’ were in constant touch with the traders of Massalia, the Kelts waited to learn the use of gold and silver until B.C. 400? The Basque name for gold is urrea. It is quite possible that the Keltic name was obtained from the Iberians, whom they found already in possession of Western Europe. But there is another alternative which is probably to be preferred. As we found the Albanians calling gold by a name derived from the gold coins of Florence, so the Kelts may have adopted the Latin names for gold used by their Roman conquerors. This is made almost certain by the fact that aura, in old Norse, derived from Latin aurum, became the regular word for treasure, although no one will deny that the Teutonic peoples had already gold and its cognates as terms of their own for the metal. Everyone is familiar with the influence exercised by the Roman coinage even in the countries of the East, where Rome met with a civilization hoary in age before Romulus founded Rome, and from which Rome herself had ultimately derived the art of coining. Yet by the time of Christ the Roman denarius, the penny of our Authorized Version, had already asserted itself in the Greek-speaking provinces of the East, and became in later days, when the rule of Rome and Constantinople fell before the Arab conquerors, under the form of dinar, the standard coin of the great Mahomedan Empires. Did then in like fashion the Roman form of the name for gold, which in all probability varied but little from the cognate Gaulish word, supplant at a comparatively early period that native form?