Where did all the Gold and Jewels Come From?

I most of the ancient civilizations, there was much gold and jewels available.
My questions is where did Solomon and the Egyptians as a for instance find all the gold and jewels?
There were not gold mines in Israel or in Egypt that has been spoken of.
Were they able to make all this from alchemy, as I doubt boats could have visited with gols and jewels make their way to all countries with unending amounts of precious gold and jewels.Ships too flimsy, IMO.

It was all costume jewelry from a catalogue...

Trinket monkeys, not just for baubles anymore...

I did a quick google search and found this.

nefertiti.iwebland.com...

With the Nile cutting through various rock formations, Egyptian quarries are often close to the river. Metal and precious stones on the other hand were found mostly in the desert, where living conditions were difficult.
Work in the mines was therefore often seasonal. Harurre, treasurer of the god and master of the double cabinet arrived at Maghara in the summer, in his words not the season for going to this Mine-land
...
Gold was one of the first metals to be exploited. The gold of the mountains, as the scribes of Ramses III called it, was found mainly in the Eastern Desert and Nubia. The Koptos gold for instance was mined in the Bekhen mountains. Seti gave these mines to a small temple he had built and dedicated to Amen, Re, Osiris and a number of other gods. The workers mining the gold, the "flesh of the gods", for the temple were exempt from any other work.

I hope that helps.

Yes, that helps..Did Egypt share with Israel or Italy?

Originally posted by siriuslyone
Yes, that helps..Did Egypt share with Israel or Italy?

I think trade would be a better word than share, but yes they did share. Refer to my links below:

Ancient Metallurgy

Ancient Jewelry

Ancient Trade Routes

Ancient Civilization



[edit on 2006/1/31 by GradyPhilpott]

Grady;

Thank you, I have always wondered who made the 200 miles tunnels in Peru that were are with gold..and HOW.
Seamanship must have been WONDROUS back then

~~

Legend has it that King Solomon ( of Jewish tradition fame )
had some secret mines where very pure gold was mined...
and he used the gold to gild the furnishings of the (1st)Temple he commissioned to be built in honor of the Israelite tribal G-d...

i think some of the semi precious stones came from thru the trade routes,

but i believe the Amber came from the region around present day Lithuania.....
somewhere in the Bible it is noted that the Amber for the Temple came from the 'mountain of Luit' and i opine that that refers to the well known deposits of Amber which can be mined/found in Lithuaniua -around the Baltic Sea- which is also in the recesses of the north

i think some of the semi precious stones came from thru the trade routes,

That is probably so, I just last night started wondering how did the ancients know what gold was? It could just as well if they made copper, bronze, etc a metal MORE precious.
Who taught them them what a precious stone was?
Seems since way before Moses, gold was venerated.
Pearls have been precious so long, there are no more to be found in the usual locations, have to be inseminated.
All these questions wander around in my noggin and imo, perhaps they had help from the aliens to know what was what

Originally posted by siriuslyone


I just last night started wondering how did the ancients know what gold was?

Who taught them them what a precious stone was?
Seems since way before Moses, gold was venerated.

i kinda think that stone-age peoples knew of gold from the odd nuggets
found in streams etc. i guess that the glowing, soft(ish) metal had unique properties & was heavier than most stones/ores....and because it was a rare find...it had 'value' and eventually became coveted...

i guess the leaders & powerful individuals in any tribe or clan group was where any gold finally found, had its resting place.
then when warrior groups raided a village for supplies & slaves, they also found the leaders stash of the rare metal he was hoarding.

remember the wise-crack idea,,, that some people are attracted to shiny
and sparkly stuff???
well gold and crystals and rare colored rocks attract attention...
and a general consensus makes these objects inordinately "valuable"

the alien influence you allude to....might just be that inner voice in us that sometimes subscums to greed,
& lust for shiny objects ,
& trinkets that others cherish,

then the objects or precious metal become more desired because of the strife and efforts, including murder & theft, used to obtain/acquire the bobbles and trinkets (jewels +gold)

imho

remember the wise-crack idea,,, that some people are attracted to shiny

Yes, having been in the jewelry business in my family. I kick my butt for not stashing gold at $32.00 an ounce in the seventies.
This lead my mind to platinum and silver, the only difference in those are the fact that platinum does not tarnish.
It is very sad that cubic zirconia and gold-filled are being sold as real sliver and diamonds.
One can buy a machine that will make CZ and colored stones by figuring out a way to imitate the pressure that creates both in afew months
And many people get ripped- off as there are not that MANY real jewelers nor matchmakers who know what they are doing these days.
Example--I bought a native american bracelet on ebay that was hand made and it has 2 dimes soldered underneath it for support.I recognized it as being a large fire opal which is worth thousands in this condition.I got it for a song and then got lot of emails wishing to buy it, like I did not know what it was..the only thing that bothers me, is I have nobody nor charity I wish to leave my collection to..off track, sorry..
All that glitters may be fake,LOL
I LOVE jewelry as I was raised on pawn shops, yard sales, etc.

Two recurring geographic areas mentioned as gold producing in the bible are Havilah and Ophir.

Here is what Genesis 2 says in describing the lands Around the Garden of Eden. (gulf of Aden???)

10 And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.

11The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold;

12And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone.

Here's I Kings 9:28, telling about King Solomon's mines:

28And they came to Ophir, and fetched from thence gold, four hundred and twenty talents, and brought it to king Solomon.

Here's another one:

Isaiah 13:12
I will make man more precious than fine gold; even a man than the golden wedge of Ophir.

Basically, in that last verse, God is threatening to eradicate humans until they are rarer than the gold of ophir.

The big deal about ophir is that is was supposed to be a vein (wedge?) of 100% pure gold, that required no smelting or hot-working to be processed. If true, then it was the only place on earth to have pure gold in a natural state.

Ophir is supposed to be in the "empty quarter" of Sa'udi Arabia. Solomon would have sent ships from the Negev around Yemen and to Oman, from whence they'd go into the desert.

I think the Qur'an mentions the Lost City of Irem as being a way-station on the route to king solomon's mine. The city of Ubar (which some claim is Irem) was allegedly located in the late 80's by NASA, doing satelite imaging of the sands of arabia, helping that govt find oil. It has been excavated since then.

Think of it this way. The first humans got all the best gold. We who come later have to look harder and work harder to get their tailings.

Either that or you'd have to believe in alchemy.

Either that or you'd have to believe in alchemy.

Very enlightening post, but gold was so available to most ancient civilizations, I guess my bottom line is that they were taught alchemy, but by whom?
When the Jews made the golden calf, were they carrying or wearing enough gold to make an object that large? How did they smelt it?
This can bring up more questions than I can even think of..Thank you for you adroit post.

Originally posted by siriuslyone

When the Jews made the golden calf, were they carrying or wearing enough gold to make an object that large?

Well, the Egyptian people (not Pharaoh and his nobles) were so happy to be free of the accursed hebrews that they gave them gold and silver to get them out of the land, seeing as how their presence in egypt had brought plagues of blood, frogs, gnats flies, lice, hail, boils, death of livestock, darkness, and the death of the first born.

So yeah, among a large enough group, there'd be enough gold to make a calf.


Now. If you would like to be really pestered by the Biblical text, try this one on for size. It's not the golden calf that is so problematic, it is what Moses did with it after punishing the survivors who had worshipped it:

Exodus 32:20

Then he [Moses, ed.] took the calf which they had made, burned it in the fire, and ground it to powder; and he scattered it on the water and made the children of Israel drink it.

So, look at what Moses did:

1. Burned it in fire. Gold, as a heavy metal, is not combustable in anything but a modern blast furnace. It melts at temperatures obtainable with bellows in a buried smelter that Egyptian-era technology would have known. But it doesn't actually combust until several thousand degrees. Not what you can produce with a campfire.

2. Ground it to powder. Gold is one of the most malleable metals, and doesn't fracture like iron or chrome does. It can be beaten out into sheets as thin as 10 molecules, like the film on the windows of the space shuttle, that filter out radiation. But because of its super-malleability, the one thing you cannot do is grind it to a powder. Only the iron pyrites (fools gold) can be treated this way, and so this has been about the oldest test for true gold - malleability, and lack of "pulverisability."

3. Scattered it "on the face of" the water. That is the literal rendering of the Hebrew here. On the surface of. But of course, gold doesn't float, since its specific gravity is about 19 times that of water. Gold sinks. Unless it's moses that's doing the scattering, apparently.

So, how do you explain this?

Scribal ignorance? Hardly. The scribes were the moneyed class of Israel, and were the most likely handlers of gold in that society. More than anyone besides goldsmiths, the king's courtiers and clerks would have known the qualities of gold, since they were in charge of the king's coffers. And First Chronicles says that these are the dudes that started writing down the Bible for solomon.

Maybe the "golden" calf was actually a wooden idol, covered with gold leaf? That would make sense; but then why not say so, when a whole chapter is given to describing how the later ark of the covenant, a wooden object, was carefully sheathed in gold, and how the plates were joined together. In the account at Sinai, Aaron tells the people to give him earrings, not gopher wood. And he describes a process of forging, and not overlay: "I threw their ear and nose-rings in the fire, and out popped this calf!"

Somewhere, there's some 'splainin' to do.

.

3. Scattered it "on the face of" the water. That is the literal rendering of the Hebrew here. On the surface of. But of course, gold doesn't float, since its specific gravity is about 19 times that of water. Gold sinks. Unless it's moses that's doing the scattering, apparently.

Do not get me going on Biblical inaccuries!! Of course gold does not float but while we are talking Moses, how did he write all the old testament that the jews acknowledge, including genesis?
He must have lived about 2 million years, no?
Peru, Mayans,China, Japan all had access ot gold ane precious gems. Who FIRST decided what was to be precious and what was not? Did they know of the rarest of all platinum, rhodium?
So many questions,so little known..;[

People universally gravitate to gemstones. They stand out in the natural world, being both hard and translucent.

The Inca had, a few dozen years before the Spanish invasion, developed a technique for working platinum, a metal that doesn't melt until around 2000 deg centigrade, a temperature totally beyond their reach.

They would in fact grind platinum ore to a powder, then mix it with molten silver. The silver could then be worked at a reasonable temp, and the object still looked like platinum when cool. The modern term for this process in sintering. Ingenious, and unkown in the Western world till then. (probably because platinum is mostly found in the Americas)

Source


[Edit for clarity]

[edit on 26-2-2006 by dr_strangecraft]

And the other side of that 'coin' or question.....Where did it all go?? The temples of Israel and the ones in Egypt, were supposed to be decorated with loads of gold and other precious minerals and stones, before they were looted.

For instance, the treasures found in King Tut's tomb were tremendously valuable, but would have been nothing compared to the gold and jewels that would have been interred in the tombs of the greater pharaohs, like Rameses. It would seem like there would be more of it circulating today.?

They would in fact grind platinum ore to a powder, then mix it with molten silver. The silver could then be worked at a reasonable temp, and the object still looked like platinum when cool. The modern term for this process in sintering. Ingenious, and unkown in the Western world till then. (probably because platinum is mostly found in the Americas)

Mixing sliver is not done still, as if it were then it would tarnish. If I were wealthy, I would invest in PURE platinum, but nowadays, the greed factor is so overwhelming and the Asian countries buy so much, I could not trust the purity.
I use the acid tests to all the jewelry I cannot recognize by sight.
The platinum acid will MELT all others.
Finding this thread to be eye-opening.

And the other side of that 'coin' or question.....Where did it all go?? The temples of Israel and the ones in Egypt, were supposed to be decorated with loads of gold and other precious minerals and stones, before they were looted.

Mostly in the vatican, buckingham palace, and various jewish richest families, for a few.

Originally posted by siriuslyone

Mixing sliver is not done still, as if it were then it would tarnish.

Actually, if you want to get technical, the final stage of sintering is to eat away the surface silver with an acid, and then burnish the remaining (platinum) patina till it shines.

There is still microscopic bits of silver 'glue' holding the platinum together just below the surface. shining has the effect of pushing the silver particles around, and compressing them again, while all that shows is platinum.

They must have really wanted it to look "just so."

As far as where did it go? Well, maybe there's a lot more people nowadays, with a lot more brides wearing gold on their ring-fingers. . . .

Plus a lot at the bottom of the ocean, basement of Fort Knox, etc. Heck, I have a few ingots set aside for when the lights go out!


.

Plus a lot at the bottom of the ocean, basement of Fort Knox, etc. Heck, I have a few ingots set aside for when the lights go out!

Interesting, what you plan on trading platinum for" food, cigs, sex?ROFL
A special piece of jewelry I have is Edwardian pt. and I have tried to make it get damaged by dipping it into everything.
Also have a pt. mini-coin of the comet Kohoutex in a carrying case.
Watching Jews in the jewelry business in my childhood has made me a jew-el-ry freak.
That is where the word jewelry comes from.
I am learning a lot from you, keep on posting.

Never marry a man who dares to offer you a gold ring..;]