Early Uses

Abstract

It is a reasonable assumption that early man, while hunting, came across gold, then copper and later silver. Gold first because it occurs in nature almost entirely in the metallic form. Readily accessible deposits must have been attractive. The yellow color of gold was associated with the sun and the brilliant white of silver with the moon. The accurate valuation of gold and silver has suffered for the past 500 years because of that early relationship but first we must fill in some details of the intervening 10 000 years.

Allison Butts and Charles D. Coxe (eds.), Silver: Economics, Metallurgy and Use (D. van Nostrand and Co., Princeton, New Jersey, 1967). Chapter 1, ‘The History of Silver’ by Donald McDonald served as a major reference for this chapter.