and Mesopotamia were insignificant gold producers so their gold would have come from neighbouring states such as Egypt, indicating an active trading environment in that part of the world. Crete, which was a substantial sea power, would have obtained gold from the northern Aegean and from the Balkans and the Danube states, where gold was mined extensively. This gold would have been shipped through Aegean ports.
There are also theories that the Egyptians launched expeditions in the 11th century BC to eastern Africa and brought back gold from mines in the area that is now Mozambique and Zimbabwe. The Phoenicians in the 6th century BC are believed to have circumnavigated Africa, starting in the Red Sea, and brought back gold from both the eastern and western sides of the continent. It is also more than likely that large quantities of gold reached the Middle East from the neighbouring Arabian Peninsular where ancient gold workings of considerable size have been identified at Mahd adh Dhahab in Saudi Arabia near Mecca. The current mine there is a high-grade one by today’s standards (plus 20gms per tonne), and it is believed the ancient mine operated during the reign of King Solomon.
Jordan
The advanced state of Egyptian and Mesopotamian society and the sophisticated nature of their buildings and the mines and quarries that provided the raw materials suggests that the Mediterranean/Middle East region, until the rise of the Roman Republic and Empire, was the centre of the civilised world, in contrast to today. We should therefore not be surprised that other parts of the region, and in particular Jordan, have a very long history of mining, going back to the 5th millennium BC.
The copper mines of Feinan, 40 miles south of the Dead Sea, underline the importance of Jordan as a mining region at that time. Amongst the ancient mining sites uncovered are Wadi al Abiad, Wadi Ratiye and Qalb Ratiye. Evidence of more than 100 mines has been found in this broad area, where ancient miners cut up to 30 feet drives into hillsides following the visible copper veins. The adits and drives that have been uncovered by archaeologists appear to have been kept low and were no more than 8 feet wide, with pillars to support the roof. This enabled miners to gain access to the veins, mining them in a gallery setting, maximising the amount of metal taken out and minimising the amount of digging required.
This room and pillar method of mining was accompanied by backfilling in a number of cases, which is an unusually advanced concept for the time and required considerable physical effort on the part of the miners. This was effort without any obvious economic return, except to avoid the galleries’ roofs collapsing – perhaps an early example of mine reclamation. Flint picks and stone hammers found around the site, very much as elsewhere, provided the tools needed for mining in these early days.
As well as gallery mining there were a number of small-scale copper diggings at Madsus, another regional mining site. Here copper ore had been washed down over time from higher levels to terraces below, where the miners dug small pits to retrieve the copper-enriched material. These diggings were close to the ancient settlement of Wadi Fidan 4 where evidence has been found of residues from copper smelting, suggesting an integrated settlement that mined, treated and made copper objects such as weapons.
The investigation of Wadi Fidan suggests that the smelting process was the familiar one whereby a crucible containing copper ore was covered by charcoal and fired to start the smelting of the high grade ore. The slag that has been found at Wadi Fidan suggests that copper metal in this ancient process did not, as would become the case in later eras, become fully molten.
It is also worth noting that at Feinan the mines were not in close proximity to the smelting settlements and ore would have been transported some miles to be treated. This probably occurred in order to get economies of scale at the smelting end; in due course mine output would have expanded and it would then have been worthwhile having smelting capability close to the actual mines.
These mines were clearly operational for centuries and were worked again by the Romans when they applied their advanced mining technology in the 1st century BC.
Greece
One of the most famous mines of the Iron Age was the great silver and lead operation at Laurion, a few miles south of Athens, developed in the 5th century BC. Greece was a major area for silver mining and its coinage and regional wealth was based on the metal. In this it was different from Egypt and indeed also from rival Persia, both of whose wealth was built on gold. Gold was also the financial key to Rome’s wealth and power later. Laurion was originally worked in the 2nd millennium BC but really came into its own under the Greeks, whose main sources of silver in northern Greece had been cut off by the Persians in 512 BC.
The Laurion mines were first worked as shallow pits going down no more than a few feet. In due course the Greeks started sinking shafts and as many as 2000 have been identified at the ancient site. The shafts were sunk in pairs and with multiple crosscuts, which also aided ventilation. As the shaft system deepened it was joined together by drifts and the shafts themselves went down as much as 300 feet; it has been calculated that progress could have been at a rate of 5 feet a month. However, it is important to remember that both shaft sinking and mining was spread over several centuries so the relatively slow shaft-sinking rate was not really a handicap in economic terms.
At 300 feet the ancient miners, many of them slaves, would have reached the water table inhibiting further shaft deepening. The shafts themselves were well-constructed, often perpendicular and around 6 feet by 3 feet in diameter. The mining method was fairly rudimentary but since this was now the Iron Age the mining tools were often picks and chisels of wrought iron, which were more effective than the old stone implements used previously. Underground the drifts followed the veins of ore and galleries supported by un-mined rock pillars provided the miners with enough room to prise the ore from the rock.
Once the ore had been mined it was carried to the surface where it was crushed and then washed on grooved tables allowing the metal grains to be caught in the grooves and the waste crushed rock to be washed away. Since the mine was in a dry region, water was precious and the Greeks stored their water for washing the ore in tanks built into the hillside. They also recycled used water back into the tanks after the treatment sludge had been removed in settling basins. The remaining concentrate was treated in small furnaces to free the silver and then fired again in clay crucibles, which allowed the lead to oxidise forming a disposable slag and leaving behind pure silver. The Greeks may have been cruel taskmasters when it came to the conditions under which their slave miners worked, but these mining techniques nonetheless displayed technically advanced knowledge.
The Laurion silver mines eventually closed in the 2nd century AD, partly due to exhaustion and partly due to new, richer silver mines being found in Macedonia and Thrace to the north. It is interesting that over the seven or so centuries silver was mined at Laurion political and military struggles between the Greek city states of Athens and Sparta often had silver at their centre, as one of the main targets of the conflicts. Laurion was also central to the ability of Athens to see off Xerxes and the Persian army when they invaded in 480 BC, for it was the wealth from Laurion that enabled Athens to build a navy that effectively cut off the Persians after they had sacked Athens and it was also the wealth produced by Laurion that enabled Athens to be rebuilt.
Asia Minor
The area historically known as Asia Minor includes Anatolia (modern Turkey) and in terms of ancient trading relations it also touches on Syria, Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), Persia (modern Iran) and Armenia. Assyria (the ancient empire that covered parts of the region, expanding and contracting over the centuries) was one of the ancient world’s most advanced civilisations and was an important factor in the emergence of the Bronze Age in the 3rd millennium BC. At its height in the 1st century BC, the Assyrian Empire was also a highly developed society which had embraced technological change and had pioneered
