In an article I wrote for the 50th issue of Ancient Egypt magazine (October/November 2008), I quoted from an ancient diplomatic letter addressed to Amenhotep III, in which an Assyrian king wrote ‘Gold in your country is like dirt; one simply gathers it up.’ This quotation, together with many other sources of inspiration, led some years later to my first book A Gift of Geology, in which I explored my deeply held view that the development of pharaonic Egypt owed a great deal to its vast mineral wealth, and the power and influence that such mineral wealth provided.
Metals
Pharaonic Egypt had abundant access to metals such as gold and copper, principally in the Red Sea Hills, the desert mountain range that lies between the River Nile and the Red Sea. Over immense periods of geological time, the ancient rocks of the Red Sea Hills had endured earth movements on a scale that is difficult for us to comprehend, from vast volcanic eruptions to collisions between long-lost continents. Tortured and. twisted over hundreds of millions of years, the naturally low and diffuse mineral content that is present in most rocks became concentrated into a network of mineral-rich veins that cut through the strata of the Red Sea Hills.
It appears that copper was the first metal to be exploited in the ancient world: the earliest evidence for smelting copper ores was discovered in Serbia, dating to c.5500 BC. However, it has not been possible to reconstruct how this technology developed. The first essential requirement for any metal-working technology is the development of effective prospecting methods to identify the metal-rich rocks. With copper, early prospecting is likely to have focused on the distinct blue or green colour of weathered copper minerals – colours that can be readily identified in the landscape. The second essential requirement was the ability to smelt the ores. Although camp fires would not typically reach the temperatures required for the first accidental smelting of copper, early pottery kilns are likely to have allowed sufficient temperatures to be sustained, heralding the beginning of the slow transition from stone to metal tools.
