Ancient Gold Mining in Tubal-Cain

1915

From Their Method Originated the Legend of the Golden Fleece

Country Still Rich in Most Valuable Ores

In the legend of the Golden Fleece lies hidden the record of an ancient method of the Tibareni, the sons of Tubal, for the collection of gold.

The north coast of Asia Minor produced large quantities of the precious metals, as well as copper and iron. Gold was found in the gravel, as often happens still in streams draining from copper regions. The gold in copper ores, originally containing insignificant amounts of the precious metals, accumulates in the course of ages, and sometimes forms placers of astonishing richness.

The ancient Tibareni washed the gold-bearing gravel, first by booming, which concentrated the gold into relatively small amounts of sand. This was then collected and washed through sluices having the bottoms lined with sheepskins. The gold would sink into the wool, while the sand would be washed away in the swift current, writes Courtenay de Kalk in the Mining Age. The skins were removed from the sluices, the coarser gold shaken out, and the fleeces, still glittering with the yellow metal, were hung upon boughs to dry so that the rest of the gold might be beaten from them and saved.

The early Greek mariners, witnessing this process, carried home tales of the wonderful riches of a land where a warlike race of miners hung golden fleeces upon the trees in the grove of Ares. After so many millenniums the metalliferous country of Tubal-Cain is once more coming into prominence. The natives still cull the high-grade copper ore, and break it into smalls, which they cover with wood and roast to matte; they still work the matte in forge-like furnaces to black copper, which they ship to Alexandretta and to Euxine ports. They still make the famous carbonized iron that was celebrated as Damascus steel because it was distributed through this mart to the rest of the world after receiving a finish by local Damascene workmen.

These decadent methods, that give a hint of the approved practice of the father of metallurgy, will soon became wholly extinct, for the modern miner is studying the disseminated copper ores of the Black sea coast, and threatening to rekindle on a magnificent scale the smoldering fires of Tubal-Cain.