Ancient Egypt: The Gold of Power and Praise

Welcome to How Minerals Made Civilization. Today we visit ancient Egypt for thousands of years, one of the most powerful empires in the eastern Mediterranean. But where did that power come from? What enabled the pharaohs to send armies abroad, memorialize themselves in pyramids at home, and have things their own way around the Mediterranean for millennia? In one word, gold. The entire apparatus of the Egyptian state was based on heaps and heaps of the rarest, most coveted metallic mineral in history. The pharaohs maintained their political and economic power by distributing gold gifts, goods, and offerings, or by refusing to distribute them. Gold helped with the pharaohs' religious and social power too. It was a lot easier to convince people of their connection with divine authority when they and everything they owned were plated in gleaming bright yellow stuff beyond the ken of the common man. The pharaoh sat on a gold throne under a gold canopy, dressed in a golden kilt and massive gold jewelry. In an age where any metal was precious and nothing gleamed, it was the closest thing that most common people would ever see to the brilliance of the sun come down to earth. Drop in a few hundred pounds of gold in tactful donations to the temples and priests now and then, and you'll have a pretty credible imitation of a god king come down to earth. But here's the mystery. Where did they get that much gold? There are several gold mines in the desert east of the Nile, but Egypt itself doesn't have nearly enough in the way of gold deposits to supply the pharaohs' legendary appetite for bling. You can't get gold out of just anywhere. If you go dig up a cubic yard of Egyptian dirt, it might contain a few nanograms of gold, and good luck extracting any of it with old kingdom technology. Now, there are gold deposits, places where geologic processes have led to very high concentrations of gold, and Egypt does contain a few of those. But even by the middle of the old kingdom, demand had shot way, way past the supply that was available from those mines. By the sixth dynasty, around 2400 BC, the Egyptian elites were offering gold by the pound at temples, keeping even more for themselves, and trading lots of it around as an early version of money. Coins wouldn't exist as such for another 1500 years, but gold ingots and gold artifacts were used in high-value commercial transactions anyway as a medium of exchange. By the 12th dynasty, shortly after 2000 BC, most of the pharaohs' annual revenue came from gold mining. And around the start of the new kingdom, the pharaohs were taking in gold by the hundreds of pounds a year, flat minimum that we know of. That's probably a vast underestimate. One single donation by the pharaoh Hatshepsut to the temple at Karnak amounted to more than half a ton of solid gold. Clearly, the Egyptians were downstream of a massive flow of prosperity. The gold was all coming north from Nubia, what's now the Sudan. The Egyptian name was from Nub, which meant gold. That is a hint to what they found in the region and what was important to them. From 3000 BC, the Egyptians had been making occasional raids down to Nubia to relieve the locals of as much gold as they could by whatever means they deemed necessary. But it wasn't until about 2600 BC, after an enterprising Egyptian official figured out how to pass the first cataract of the Nile, that the Egyptian gold acquisition program really got going. It started out with more raiding expeditions, but now instead of just taking gold jewelry from the Nubians, they started actually mining this stuff. Government officials led military campaigns whose entire purpose was to force the Nubians to mine gold and hand it over for the royal treasury. By about the early 15th century BC, that had turned into full-fledged colonization as the pharaoh Thutmose III invaded Nubia for the sole purpose of establishing control over the gold mines. As you might expect of the monarch who won original Armageddon at the Battle of Megiddo, he was wildly successful. According to the records, that netted him more than half a ton of gold per year. Again, probably a vast underestimate. But for scale, if you assume about 14 to 1500 dollars per ounce gold today, that would be about 50 million dollars per year. Even in 2021, that is a nice chunk of change. In 1450 BC, it was probably larger than the remainder of the world economy put together. With national budgets today in the trillions and shiny metals all around us, it's hard to describe what it meant for the pharaoh to have that much gold. First of all, there was the political power that came with the economic clout. Being the pharaoh with the Nubian gold mines under his control was pretty much like being the U.S. Federal Reserve crossed with the sun god Amun-Ra. He could arm the biggest army around, pay mercenaries to make it even bigger, and bribe or browbeat his fellow monarchs around the region to follow his line. Kings from faraway lands sent letters addressing the pharaoh as their brother, professing fraternal love and begging the pharaoh to share the wealth. Let my brother send me much gold, gold beyond measure. Let him send more gold to me than he did to my father, for in my brother's land, gold is as common as dust, reads one cuneiform plea from a cash-strapped monarch of the Mitanni. Secondly, there was the social and religious power that came from all the gold. Metals were rare at this time, and gold was the rarest of all. And every ancient civilization around the world that has ever used gold has compared it to the sun. And in Egypt, the sun was the chief of gods. Surrounding himself with gold impressed everyone around the pharaoh, not just with his wealth, but with his connection to the life-giving creator, Ra. He used gold to distribute not only money, but gifts that put the receiver in the same mystical connection with the god. And a gift of a few talents of gold would usually convince any dissenters who might have thought that the pharaoh was a mere mortal. The pharaohs maintained their retainer's loyalty with gifts of gold to the extent that receiving the gold of praise, as it was called, became a literary metaphor for being in high royal favor. But like so much else about ancient Egypt, maintaining that power took a lot of work. And it's safe to say that the pharaoh wasn't out there digging all that gold himself. And it got harder over time to maintain output. The early Nubian mines had been placer deposits, which are easy to work. A placer is basically river gravel. Gold is much heavier than most rocks, so when it washes around in a stream, it tends to lag behind the rest of the pebbles. Water can't carry it as far. That means that gold nuggets concentrate around bends in the river. And if you know where to look, you can literally mine gold with a wooden shovel and a washbowl. It's that easy. That's what the earliest gold seekers had been doing, except that the placer deposits were exhausted of their gold supply long before the gold demand of the pharaohs was exhausted. As a matter of fact, there are no records of the pharaoh's demand for gold ever being exhausted. Rather than give up their bling and all that political, social, cultural, religious, and economic power that came with it, the ancient Egyptian pharaohs promptly invented exploration geology. The world's oldest surviving geological map from about 1150 BC is a papyrus showing the topography, geography, and locations of gold mines around Wadi Hammamat. The divisors of minerals, as the ancient Egyptians called prospecting geologists, would mark the papyrus maps with the color of the rocks, the rock textures, and the locations of streams to try to find deposits. If that didn't work, they'd usually try praying to Hathor, goddess of mines and divine mistress of turquoise for better luck. But better geologic mapping and praying to Hathor won't magically infuse more gold into the ground. So the Egyptians tried another trick. They figured out where the gold had been eroding into the placers and chased the traces upstream to find the gold loads or gold-bearing quartz veins. There, they started digging shafts. Or rather, they forced anyone who couldn't resist to dig the shafts. Slaves, prisoners, and miscellaneous forced laborers swung 16-pound stone hammers night and day at solid rock. The lucky ones later on had bronze picks, but sometimes even that didn't help, in which case they'd set a fire under the rock. Then some poor Sob had to stay in the mine breathing smoke until the rock was hot enough and throw water on the rock to quench it. When rock is hot, it expands. And if the miners were lucky, the quenching would cool the rock so fast that it didn't have time to contract without cracking. This method was called fire setting, and it was a common mining technique around the world wherever there was enough fuel for it. Not only was it smoky, air in general got to be a problem as the Egyptian mines pushed 20, then 30 meters deep. Back then, they couldn't usually go deeper than 35 meters because of the difficulty of providing air flow that far, mine ventilation not having been invented yet. Even then, the conditions were pretty miserable. Down in the mine, the miners would dislodge the cracked and broken rock and put it in baskets, which porters would haul up to the surface on ladders. There, they would pound the rock chunks on anvil stones down to about pea-sized fragments, then grind them in a type of mill that we also see being used for grinding flour. That finally freed the gold from the quartz vein rocks and they could purify the gold by washing it, just like for a placer, but only after a lot more work to mine it. Mining the quartz loads kept the Egyptian pharaohs solvent, mostly, until a series of particularly glittering rulers around 1300 BC. Most of them were named Ramses, which must be ancient Egyptian for extravagant. Not content with building wonders of the world as tombs and monuments to themselves and sequestering the combined annual income of 12 towns just for their mortuary services, Ramses II through IX managed to splurge even more on gifts, monuments, and propaganda than their massive gold intake from Nubia could match. They clearly weren't putting the money into armies because Egyptian control over Nubia started to slip around this time and one of the first things the Nubians did as soon as they could was to stop sending gold to Egypt. The remaining mining in the Egyptian eastern desert started to slide too as government control over that region began to slip as well. Ramses IX may have temporarily augmented his gold income through a state-sponsored pillaging of gold from his predecessor's tombs in the Theban necropolis, but it didn't manage to sustain production. The gold mining industry in both Egypt and Nubia went into decline before 1200 BC and it wouldn't recover until the Ptolemies, almost a thousand years later. The gold wealth of ancient Egypt was the stuff of legend and rightly so. It was the basis for the political power, the social system, the religion, the culture, and a large amount of the economy of the biggest empire the world had yet seen. Much of that gold later vanished into the world economy and is still circulating around it today, but the surviving remnants still impress us with the wealth and the work that they represent.