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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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.
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