It seems that in every major ancient civilization, a great many artifacts were made of gold. Was gold much more plentiful back then? Were there many sources of gold which were simply used up? How did they manage to locate and obtain so much of a “rare” metal, using only primitive technology? And why aren’t we, with superior technology, able to locate additional deposits of gold in these same areas?
As an adjunct question: How did the Hebrews, during their 40-year exodus, come up with enough gold to make a statue of a calf? How did these former-slaves hide so much gold from the Egyptians?
Gold isn’t as rare as you think it might be. Gold was likely less rare in antiquity. We’ve been mining gold for thousands of years and have long since taken all the easy gold that is close to the surface and in stream beds.
The golden calf of exodous was likely not solid gold but covered with thin, hammered plates. That gold came with them from egypt. I think they were too busy surviving the 40 years in the wilderness to have much time for placer mining.
Gold isn’t really all that rare. Yeah, what Padeye said. The ancients used up a lot of it (there’s likely still some undiscovered Egyptian tombs and the like out there full o’ gold).
Don’t even get me started on diamonds :rolleyes: (if not for DeBeers, diamonds would be nearly worthless. There’s tons of 'em)
The answer is that what ancients thought was a lot of gold was nothing compared to how much we produce today. Cecil talks about this in his column What happened to all the gold Spain got from the New World?. He esimates that the total world gold production in the 1500’s, when the Spanish were hauling out all that gold out of the Americas, was 36 tons. The total world production for the first 76 years of the 20th century was 76,428 tons. So we are finding a lot of gold now.
They probably found whatever gold that happened to be lying on the surface, which wasn’t very much. They likely discovered gold when they were smelting copper or iron ore to make weapons or tools.
Many gold artifacts are not likely solid gold. As others had said the golden calf was probably made from sheets of hammered gold. Or it maybe it was a myth with no historicity to it whatsoever.
Gold has a really nice tendency to bond with itself, so it tends to collect in decent-sized hunks. I suspect it was found rather commonly in mountain rivers, where chunks of gold might be abrated over time until they could be easily spotted in the water. It’s very malleable, so you can pound on a mostly-gold rock to squish out the non-metal parts, and that malleability lends itself to craftsmanship. And it has a low melting point, so even ancient cultures could, with a stiff breeze at the top of a hill or far more sophisticated systems, make a fire hot enough to refine it to a level of purity that compares well with today.
Once it is processed to a level of decent purity, gold is hard to lose (but fairly easy to steal). It is unusually heavy, and of course it is shiny, and it is usually very well taken care of by its owners–as far back as the Bronze Age, if not farther, gold has been valued for the aforementioned reasons. A carefully crafted work of art is only marginally more valuable to a thief than if it is melted back down into an ingot, so I think a lot of ancient pieces find their way back into modern supply. I don’t think it is out of the realm of possibility that that class ring of yours has a certain (very small) percentage of one of Alexander the Great’s talents.
I tend to disagree. I believe the total amount of gold in the world, if it were all lumped together and pressed into one chunk, is estimated to fit inside a normal-sized one-family house. 'Course, that’s still about 20,000 tons of gold (after rough calculations), or a gold ring on the finger of every living human.
It also must be considered that gold does not rot, rust or otherwise decay. The ancients had artifacts made of a multitude of materials, of which gold was probably a small percentage. If the gold ones tend to endure longer it makes it seem like they were a greater percentage.
Whoops… mea culpa. I was using one of those “rule of thumb” estimates–it appears I was wrong.
(I also should note I was talking about solid gold. The total amount of dissolved gold in the oceans exceeds the amount of solid gold by several orders of magnitude. Unfortunately, it costs more to get it out (right now) than it would be worth…)
It was at the beginning, but the cause (as stated in the Bible) was not that sin, but the Israelites’ sin of trusting the spies over the word of G-d. (Numbers 14)
What about the gold that’s used in electronics? I know that some is used for bond wires inside IC packages, and printed circuit boards often use gold-plated printed wires, because the gold keeps it from oxidizing. If you’ve ever added memory or an interface card to your PC, you’ve probably seen the gold-plated connectors, where it’s used because it doesn’t oxidize and it’s a good conductor.
I doubt that much of this gold is recovered, but how much is it? Not very much per part, but there sure are an awful lot of electronic devices out there.
Actually, there are reclaimers who specialize in this time of stuff. In addition to gold, there are many other rare/expensive metals that can be recovered for profit.
“The world’s governments hold about 42,000 short tons (38,000 metric tons or 38 million kilograms) of gold in their official stocks.” http://www.gold.org/Gedt/Gdt24/India.htm
“In India, gold demand set a second quarter record, rising to 206.1 tonnes, 15% above the second quarter of 1997 which was itself higher than in earlier years.”
(Note: India uses 1/3 of the worlds’s gold production. I saw a show about gold on Discovery recently that said brides wear up to a pound of gold jewelry when they get married.) http://mbendi.co.za/indy/ming/gold/af/p0005.htm
“South Africa’s gold production has been declining steadily, with an annual decrease of around 4% since 1990, and in 1999 production was 425 tonnes (18% of global production), down from 1998’s 473 tonnes.” http://www.goldfever.org/GoldFever-Behind3.htm
“Further north, they filmed the famed Sikh religious shrine, the Amritsar Golden Temple, clad in 300 tons of gold, and an Indian wedding, to which the bride brings her gold dowry.”
