A child finds a shiny rock in a creek, thousands of years ago, and the human race is introduced to gold for the first time.
Gilded was kickoff discovered equally shining, yellowish nuggets. "Gold is where y'all detect it," and then the maxim goes, and aureate was showtime discovered in its natural state, in streams all over the world. No doubt information technology was the beginning metal known to early hominids.
Gold became a role of every human being culture. Its brilliance, natural dazzler, and luster, and its great malleability and resistance to tarnish made it enjoyable to work and play with.
Because gilt is dispersed widely throughout the geologic globe, its discovery occurred to many dissimilar groups in many different locales. And nearly everyone who found it was impressed with information technology, then was the developing civilization in which they lived.
Gold was the outset metallic widely known to our species. When thinking about the historical progress of technology, nosotros consider the development of iron and copper-working as the greatest contributions to our species' economic and cultural progress – simply gold came first.
Gilded is the easiest of the metals to work. It occurs in a virtually pure and workable state, whereas well-nigh other metals tend to be found in ore-bodies that pose some difficulty in smelting. Gold's early uses were no doubt ornamental, and its brilliance and permanence (information technology neither corrodes nor tarnishes) linked it to deities and royalty in early civilizations .
Gold has always been powerful stuff. The earliest history of human interaction with gilt is long lost to u.s., simply its association with the gods, with immortality, and with wealth itself are common to many cultures throughout the world.
Early civilizations equated golden with gods and rulers, and golden was sought in their name and dedicated to their glorification. Humans nearly intuitively identify a high value on aureate, equating it with ability, beauty, and the cultural elite. And since gold is widely distributed all over the globe, we notice this same thinking about gold throughout aboriginal and modern civilizations everywhere.
Golden, beauty, and power accept ever gone together. Gold in ancient times was fabricated into shrines and idols ("the Golden Calf"), plates, cups, vases and vessels of all kinds, and of course, jewelry for personal beautification.
The "Golden of Troy" treasure hoard, excavated in Turkey and dating to the era 2450 -2600 B.C., show the range of gold-piece of work from delicate jewelry to a gold gravy boat weighing a full troy pound. This was a time when gold was highly valued, but had not yet become money itself. Rather, it was endemic past the powerful and well-connected, or made into objects of worship, or used to decorate sacred locations.
Gilded has e'er had value to humans, even before information technology was coin. This is demonstrated past the boggling efforts made to obtain it. Prospecting for gilt was a worldwide effort going back thousands of years, fifty-fifty earlier the first money in the form of gold coins appeared about 700 B.C.
In the quest for gilt by the Phoenicians, Egyptians, Indians, Hittites, Chinese, and others, prisoners of war were sent to piece of work the mines, as were slaves and criminals. And this happened during a fourth dimension when gilt had no value as 'money,' but was simply considered a desirable commodity in and of itself.
The 'value' of gold was accustomed all over the world. Today, as in ancient times, the intrinsic appeal of gold itself has that universal entreatment to humans. But how did gold come up to exist a commodity, a measurable unit of value?
Aureate, measured out, became money. Golden's beauty, scarcity, unique density (no other metal exterior the platinum group is equally heavy), and the ease by which it could exist melted, formed, and measured made information technology a natural trading medium. Gilded gave rise to the concept of money itself: portable, private, and permanent. Gold (and silver) in standardized coins came to supplant barter arrangements, and made merchandise in the Classic period much easier.
Gold was money in ancient Greece. The Greeks mined for gilded throughout the Mediterranean and Eye Due east regions past 550 B.C., and both Plato and Aristotle wrote about gold and had theories about its origins. Aureate was associated with water (logical, since about of it was found in streams), and it was supposed that golden was a particularly dumbo combination of water and sunlight.
The Incas referred to gold as the "tears of the Lord's day."
Homer,in the "Iliad" and "Odyssey," makes mention of gold equally the glory of the immortals and a sign of wealth among ordinary humans. In Genesis 2:10-12, we learn of the river Pison out of Eden, and "the land of Havilah, where there is gold: and the aureate of that land is good?"
As far back as 3100 B.C., nosotros have bear witness of a gilded/silvery value ratio in the code of Menes, the founder of the showtime Egyptian dynasty. In this code it is stated that "1 role of gilt is equal to two and 1 half parts of silvery in value." This is our primeval of a value relationship between gold and silverish.
In ancient Egypt, around the time of Seti I (1320 B.C.), we find the creation of the first golden treasure map now known to us. Today, in the Turin Museum is a papyrus and fragments known as the "Carte des mines d'or." Information technology pictures gold mines, miners' quarters, road leading to the mines and gold-bearing mountains, and so on.
Where is that gold mine located? Well, you know how it is with treasure maps – there'southward always something a lilliputian vague about them, to throw you off the trail.
Modern thought is that it portrays the Wadi Fawakhir region in which the El Sid gold mine is located, but the thing is far from settled. Jason and the Argonauts sought the Golden Fleece effectually 1200 B.C.
That Greek myth makes more sense when you realize that the fleece that it refers to is the sheep'due south fleece used in the recovery of fine placer gold.
Early on miners would use water ability to propel gold-begetting sand over the hide of a sheep, which would trap the tiny, but heavy, flakes of gold. When the fleece had absorbed all it could hold, this 'golden fleece' was hung upwardly to dry, and when dry would be beaten gently so that the gold would autumn off and exist recovered.
This primitive grade of hydraulic mining began thousands of years agone, and was however being used past some miners as recently every bit the California gold rush of 1849.
The offset employ of gold every bit money occurred around 700 B.C., when Lydian merchants produced the first coins. These were only stamped lumps of a 63% gold and 27% silverish mixture known as 'electrum.' This standardized unit of value no doubt helped Lydian traders in their wide-ranging successes, for by the time of Croesus of Mermnadae, the last Rex of Lydia (570 -546 B.C.), Lydia had amassed a huge hoard of gold. Today, we still speak of the ultra-wealthy as being 'rich equally Croesus.'
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