when was gold discovered

No single person discovered gold but there are many traces of its use by ancient peoples. This all took place during a time when gold had no official monetary value or significance but was sought after simply because of its high desirability as a commodity.Because of being frequently located in water, gold was often thought to be a dense combination of water and sunlight, based on limited scientific and geological understanding of the both substances.With such widespread mining, both by the Greek government and private citizens, it’s not uncommon to find remains of those mines today.They built water-based mining operations, and were responsible for several of the The Romans also mined underground using mostly slave and prisoner labor. As a natural response to its beauty and rarity, gold became a symbol of royalty and glamour in nearly every culture that was able to obtain it. King Croesus of Lydia would improve the refining techniques of gold and establish the While pieces of natural gold have been discovered in Spanish caves that date as far back as 40,000 B.C., it wasn’t until The Egyptians were part of some of the earliest gold conquests, using prisoners of war, slaves and criminals to work the primitive gold mines of their time. Gold discovered in the Yukon While salmon fishing near the Klondike River in Canada’s Yukon Territory on August 16, 1896, George Carmack reportedly spots … Prospecting for gold was a worldwide effort going back thousands of years, even before the first money in the form of gold coins appeared about 700 B.C.In the quest for gold by the Phoenicians, Egyptians, Indians, Hittites, Chinese, and others, prisoners of war were sent to work the mines, as were slaves and criminals. Jason and the Argonauts sought the Golden Fleece around 1200 B.C.That Greek myth makes more sense when you realize that the fleece that it refers to is the sheep’s fleece used in the recovery of fine placer gold.Early miners would use water power to propel gold-bearing sand over the hide of a sheep, which would trap the tiny, but heavy, flakes of gold. Today, as in ancient times, the intrinsic appeal of gold itself has that universal appeal to humans. The Carolina Gold Rush, the first gold rush in the United States, followed the discovery of a large gold nugget in North Carolina in 1799, by a 12-year-old boy named Conrad Reed.He spotted the nugget while playing in Meadow Creek on his family's farm in Cabarrus County, North Carolina. Gold’s early uses were no doubt ornamental, and its brilliance and permanence (it neither corrodes nor tarnishes) linked it to deities and royalty in early civilizations .Gold, beauty, and power have always gone together. The precious metal gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au. On January 24, 1848, an event occurred in Coloma that would radically impact the history of California and the Nation. Its brilliance, natural beauty, and luster, and its great malleability and resistance to tarnish made it enjoyable to work and play with.Gold has always been powerful stuff. And this happened during a time when gold had no value as ‘money,’ but was just considered a desirable commodity in and of itself.The ‘value’ of gold was accepted all over the world. The concept of money, (i.e., gold and silver in standard weight and fineness coins) allowed the World’s economies to expand and prosper. Today, we still speak of the ultra-wealthy as being ‘rich as Croesus.’Their science may have been primitive, but the Greeks learned much about the practicalities of gold mining. It is attractive in colour and brightness, durable to the point of virtual indestructibility, highly malleable, and usually found in nature in a comparatively pure form. Related Pages: Who discovered the element gold? In January 1848, John Marshall discovered traces of gold while building a lumber mill near Sacramento for a pioneer named John Sutter. By the time of the death of Alexander of Macedon (323 B.C.

1792 – The United States adopts a gold and silver standardPresent day – no countries in the world use a gold standard EGYPTIAN CONQUESTS FOR GOLD. Rather, it was owned by the powerful and well-connected, or made into objects of worship, or used to decorate sacred locations.Gold has always had value to humans, even before it was money. How did gold get its name? Gold’s beauty, scarcity, unique density (no other metal outside the platinum group is as heavy), and the ease by which it could be melted, formed, and measured made it a natural trading medium.

During the summer of 1945, Allied currencies found at Merkers and elsewhere by the Americans were returned to various countries, and the process of restituting the artworks found at Merkers and elsewhere in the former German Reich began. Gold occurs in various parts of the world.

Gold was first discovered as shining, yellow nuggets. Towns throughout Australia owe their existence to the gold rushes of the 1800s. ), the Greeks had mined gold from the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar) all the way eastward to Asia Minor and Egypt, and we find traces of their placer mines today. ), we find the creation of the first gold treasure map now known to us. Gold in ancient times was made into shrines and idols (“the Golden Calf”), plates, cups, vases and vessels of all kinds, and of course, jewelry for personal adornment.The “Gold of Troy” treasure hoard, excavated in Turkey and dating to the era 2450 -2600 B.C., show the range of gold-work from delicate jewelry to a gold gravy boat weighing a full troy pound. It occurs in a virtually pure and workable state, whereas most other metals tend to be found in ore-bodies that pose some difficulty in smelting. Such was the demand that by 2000 BC the Egyptians began mining gold. BeBusinessed. While pieces of natural gold have been discovered in Spanish caves that date as far back as 40,000 B.C., it wasn’t until 3600 B.C. Gold was associated with water (logical, since most of it was found in streams), and it was supposed that gold was a particularly dense combination of water and sunlight.Homer,in the “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” makes mention of gold as the glory of the immortals and a sign of wealth among ordinary humans.

The first recorded discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand was made by Jan Gerrit Bantjes in June 1884, on the farm Vogelstruisfontein, and was followed soon thereafter, in September, by the Struben brothers who uncovered the Confidence Reef on the farm Wilgespruit, near present-day Roodepoort.