It’s seems to be that gold is pretty common to find in the ancient world regardless of the culture. Statues, jewelry, clothing, etc. However gold just doesn’t seem to be all that abundant. So what happened? Why did gold become so much more rare as time went on, or has it always been this rare? Where were all the major gold mines in the ancient world and are they depleted?
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Gold and silver was used as cash. So people would keep their gold and silver with them and easily accessible, even showing it off. It would also be traded a lot, a lot of the jewelry you are talking about would change hands about once a month so the same jewelry would be seen on different people throughout the year.
Today we have a lot of gold and silver, a lot more then they had in the ancient world. However it is all locked away in vaults. Gold is inconvenient to lug around. And it might even look kind of cheap and tacky. If you look at someone with five gold rings and a gold chain you would consider them stupid for not investing that gold in something to make more money.
>It’s seems to be that gold is pretty common to find in the ancient world regardless of the culture. Statues, jewelry, clothing, etc. However gold just doesn’t seem to be all that abundant. So what happened? Why did gold become so much more rare as time went on, or has it always been this rare? Where were all the major gold mines in the ancient world and are they depleted?
Gold is rare and has always been rare. It is, however **common enough** to be found in significant quantities from time to time. Combine that with the following things and it explains why gold has, throughout history, been popular:
1. It is unreactive, i.e. it occurs in its elementary form and only has to be **collected** – there is no refinement process that had to be discovered or developed.
2. It’s *pretty*. Since it doesn’t corrode it also *stays* pretty.
3. It’s comparatively easy to work. Artisans can do anything with it!
4. It’s common enough to be useful but rare enough to remain stable in value – perfect currency material!
Survivor Bias.
Gold is a non-corrosive metal. If you make stuff out of wood, it decays. Out of iron, it rusts. Out of bronze, it corrodes, but much slower than iron so there are many bronze artifacts. But gold items are as nice today as the day they were made. Gold was rare and expensive, so nice things were made of it. That doesn’t mean everything was nice and gold, but only the stuff that survived.
There was more gold per person, though more gold has been extracted in modern times there are now millions (billions) more people.
Population and proportions.
Most of what we see in the ancient world are the elites – because these were the people who were literate and left enduring writing, who could afford monumental tombs, etc. These people rarely bothered writing much about the commoners.
Commoners also make up a much larger proportion of the population than poor people do in the modern day – you need 90% or more to just farm to keep society rolling. On top of that, populations are much smaller than in modern times. As a result, the elite (who make up basically all the records we have) which can afford gold is *very small*, and consequently has potential access to a lot of gold per person.
I read somewhere that all the gold that’s ever been found in the history of the world would fill an Olympic size pool.
Whether it’s true or not….beats me.
Because majority of historical accounts are written by (or on behalf of) the ruling class, which were basically the primary gold owners of their time and society. Since it’s a symbol of status, it’s natural that they’d want to be associated with it, have their gold be documented, and be buried with some. In short, you just don’t hear about all the gold everyone else didn’t have.
In addition to what everyone else is saying, yes, mines get depleted. All the easy gold has been dug up already. The gold they’re digging up now is deeper down or otherwise hard to reach, or the individual pieces of gold are microscopic so it take special processing to get it out of the rock.
I can’t speak about all over the world, but gold rushes here were started because people found gold on the ground or on river beds. My uneducated guess is that it is a lighter metal that finds its way to the surface easily and if you find gold, there is a chance of a gold seam nearby. Here, you can find gold near certain trees.
The Welcome Nugget (69-ish kgs) was found because gold had been found nearby, some blokes wandered out from a pub and went poking around a tree literally struck gold. It was under 3cm of dirt.
I don’t know anything about how gold is formed, but it seems to be a surface metal, so easy for early people to find and manipulate into shiny shapes.
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