The Greatest Empires & Civilizations of the Ancient East: Egypt, Babylon, The Kings of Israel and Judah, Assyria, Media, Chaldea, Persia, Parthia & Sasanian Empire. George Rawlinson

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СКАЧАТЬ to ten or even twelve and a half per cent.; and, as there was no known mode of clearing the gold from it, the produce of the Gallician mine was in high esteem and greatly preferred to that of any other. Silver was yielded in very large quantities. “Spain,” says Diodorus Siculus,1018 “has the best and most plentiful silver from mines of all the world.” “The Spanish silver,” says Pliny,1019 “is the best.” When the Phoenicians first visited Spain, they found the metal held in no esteem at all by the natives. It was the common material of the cheapest drinking vessels, and was readily parted with for almost anything that the merchants chose to offer. Much of it was superficial, but the veins were found to run to a great depth; and the discovery of one vein was a sure index of the near vicinity of more.1020 The out-put of the Spanish silver mines during the Phoenician, Carthaginian, and Roman periods was enormous, and cannot be calculated; nor has the supply even yet failed altogether. The iron and copper of Spain are also said to have been exceedingly abundant in ancient times,1021 though, owing to the inferior value of the metals, and to their wider distribution, but little is recorded with regard to them. Its tin and lead, on the other hand, as being metals found in comparatively few localities, receive not infrequent mention. The Spanish tin, according to Posidonius, did not crop out upon the surface,1022 but had to be obtained by mining. It was produced in some considerable quantity in the country of the Artabri, to the north of Lusitania,1023 as well as in Lusitania itself, and in Gallicia;1024 but was found chiefly in small particles intermixed with a dark sandy earth. Lead was yielded in greater abundance; it was found in Cantabria, in Bætica, and many other places.1025 Much of it was mixed with silver, and was obtained in the course of the operations by means of which silver was smelted and refined.1026 The mixed metal was called galena.1027 Lead, however, was also found, either absolutely pure,1028 or so nearly so that the alloy was inappreciable, and was exported in large quantities, both by the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians, and also by the Romans. It was believed that the metal had a power of growth and reproduction, so that if a mine was deserted for a while and then re-opened, it was sure to be found more productive than it was previously.1029 The fact seems to be simply that the supply is inexhaustible, since even now Spain furnishes more than half the lead that is consumed by the rest of Europe. Besides the ordinary metals, Spain was capable of yielding an abundance of quicksilver;1030 but this metal seems not to have attracted the attention of the Phoenicians, who had no use for it.

The methods employed by the Phoenicians to obtain the metals which they coveted were not, on the whole, unlike those which continue in use at the present day. Where surface gold was brought down by the streams, the ground in their vicinity, and such portions of their beds as could be laid bare, were searched by the spade; any earth or sand that was seen to be auriferous was carefully dug out and washed, till the earthy particles were cleared away, and only the gold remained. Where the metal lay deeper, perpendicular shafts were sunk into the ground to a greater or less depth—sometimes, if we may believe Diodorus,1031 to the depth of half a mile or more; from these shafts horizontal adits were carried out at various levels, and from the adits there branched lateral galleries, sometimes at right angles, sometimes obliquely, which pursued either a straight or a tortuous course.1032 The veins of metal were perseveringly followed up, and where faults occurred in them, filled with trap,1033 or other hard rock, the obstacle was either tunnelled through or its flank turned, and the vein still pursued on the other side. As the danger of a fall of material from the roofs of the adits and galleries was well understood, it was customary to support them by means of wooden posts, or, where the material was sufficiently firm, to arch them.1034 Still, from time to time, falls would occur, with great injury and loss of life to the miners. Nor was there much less danger where a mountain was quarried for the sake of its metallic treasures. Here, too, galleries were driven into the mountain-side, and portions of it so loosened that after a time they detached themselves and fell with a loud crash into a mass of débris.1035 It sometimes happened that, as the workings proceeded, subterranean springs were tapped, which threatened to flood the mine, and put an end to its further utilisation. In such cases, wherever it was possible, tunnels were constructed, and the water drained off to a lower level.1036 In the deeper mines this, of course, could not be done, and such workings had to be abandoned, until the invention of the Archimedes’ screw (ab. B.C. 220-190), when the water was pumped up to the surface, and so got rid of.1037 But before this date Phoenicia had ceased to exist as an independent country, and the mines that had once been hers were either no longer worked, or had passed into the hands of the Romans or the Carthaginians.

When the various ores were obtained, they were first of all crushed, then pounded to a paste; after which, by frequent washings, the non-metallic elements were to a large extent eliminated, and the metallic ones alone left. These, being collected, were placed in crucibles of white clay,1038 which were then submitted to the action of a furnace heated to the melting point. This point could only be reached by the use of the bellows. When it was reached, the impurities which floated on the top of the molten metal were skimmed off, or the metal itself allowed, by the turning of a cock, to flow from an upper crucible into a lower one. For greater purity the melting and skimming process was sometimes repeated; and, in the case of gold, the skimmings were themselves broken up, pounded, and again submitted to the melting pot.1039 The use of quicksilver, however, being unknown, the gold was never wholly freed from the alloy of silver always found in it, nor was the silver ever wholly freed from an alloy of lead.1040

The Romans and Carthaginians worked their mines almost wholly by slave labour; and very painful pictures are drawn of the sufferings undergone by the unhappy victims of a barbarous and wasteful system.1041 The gangs of slaves, we are told, remained in the mines night and day, never seeing the sun, but living and dying in the murky and foetid atmosphere of the deep excavations. It can scarcely be hoped that the Phoenicians were wiser or more merciful. They had a large command of slave labour, and would naturally employ it where the work to be done was exceptionally hard and disagreeable. Moreover, the Carthaginians, their colonists, are likely to have kept up the system, whatever it was, which they found established on succeeding to the inheritance of the Phoenician mines, and the fact that they worked them by means of slaves makes it more than probable that the Phoenicians had done so before them.1042

When the metals were regarded as sufficiently cleansed from impurities, they were run into moulds, which took the form of bars, pigs, or ingots. Pigs of copper and lead have, as already observed, been found in Sardinia which may well belong to Phoenician times. There is also in the museum of Truro a pig of tin, which, as it differs СКАЧАТЬ