A Brief History of Gold

Gold History

Gold has had an immense impact on humanity. It has caused the fall of nations, pushed the Age of Discovery, made some men rich and others poor. It is something that we all cherish and we all want more of it. It has a bloody history at times and as Led Zeppelin once said, all that glitters is not gold. Gold is amazing, beautiful and valuable but it is also something that has helped to drive our civilization in various good and bad directions.

Archaeologists have dated gold artifacts to as far back as 4,000 BC in the Balkans but most estimates of when gold began to be used by artisans goes back a few thousand years further than that. Various items like golden hats and the Nebra disk have been found in Central Europe since around 3,000 BC.

The Ancient Egyptians were in love with gold and gold was quite common around the Nile. King Tushratta of Mitanni said that gold was more plentiful than dirt in Egypt and it was in Egypt where the first gold production and mining began. Even the world’s oldest map shows a plan for a gold mine in it, proving the power gold has had on our civilization for the past few thousand years. The Egyptians would get gold through methods like fire-setting and they set up gold mines all along the Red Sea in the current location of Saudi Arabia.

Gold was mentioned within the Bible several times, including in the Book of Revelations where New Jerusalem is described as a city where the streets are made of pure gold. Gold began to appear in more than decorative items by the sixth and fifth century BC, especially in China where a square gold coin was issued. While the Egyptians may have been the first to mine gold, the Romans were the ones who really turned it into a mass-production method. Using hydraulic mining methods in Spain from 25 BC onwards and in Romania from 150 AD onwards, the Romans mined vast amounts of gold from the Earth. One of the largest mines that the Romans had was at Las Medulas in Spain, where seven aqueducts fed water into the mine to help the Romans get at the gold.

Over 1,000 years later, the European exploration of the Americas would be fueled by the quest for gold. Gold was very common in South and Central America, so much so that the Aztec called gold “god excrement” because it was a product of the gods. Sadly, the large amount of gold and the gifts of gold for the Spanish conquistadors only fuelled their lust for more. Gold was a big reason why the Aztec Empire fell and if it was not for gold, world history may have been very different.

In the 19th century, various gold rushes helped create some of the most famous cities in the world including San Francisco.

These days, while platinum metals are usually worth more than gold, it is still widely regarded as the most desirable of precious metals. For centuries it was the standard of currencies around the world and even today it is the symbol of purity, royalty and prestige.

Today, gold is mined on an incredible scale and 75 percent of all the gold ever produced was extracted in the past 100 years. Gold is so valuable that much of the gold mined throughout history is still in use, simply recast into different shapes and products by subsequent generations.

It is estimated that some 170,000 tons of gold are now available above ground and if we were to take all the gold ever refined it would form a cube that is only 66 feet on each side.