Trade Resource Descriptions: Help the EBII Team

[Auvar]

Silver – This area is known as a rich source of silver, a precious metal widely used in art and as a medium of exchange. Many regions have small amounts of silver included in other ores, but regions like Iberia, Sardinia, Paropamisadai, Dacia, Attika, and Asia Minor, as well as parts of Albion, Gaul, and Germania were known for their silver production.

Historically, silver served alongside gold as a standard of value that was widespread across the Mediterranean world. The very earliest known coins, found in Asia Minor, are of electrum, a naturally occurring gold-silver alloy. Silver coins were minted by the Achaemenids and the Hellenistic kingdoms that succeeded them as well as the Mauryans, Carthaginians, and Romans, sometimes parallel with gold currency and sometimes exclusively, particularly when gold was scarce. Coinage was unknown among the Celts and Dacians until its gradual introduction through interactions with Greek colonies and the expanding Macedonian state, but these people were already well familiar with silver-smithing. The Dacians crafted exquisite silver spiral bracelets, sourced from rich mines in the Carpathians; when the Romans conquered Dacia, they claimed to have looted more than one million pounds* of silver from the royal treasury of Decebalus. Silver was crafted into vases, tableware, mirrors, and jewelry within the Greco-Roman world and without. On the steppe, silver bowls were buried with their owners in Sarmatian kurgans, and the famous Gundestrup cauldron, possibly of Thracian origin but crafted with Celtic motifs, stands out as an example of the skill of ancient silversmiths and the widespread appeal of silver.

Although silver does appear in nature in its pure form, as well as in natural alloys with gold – Pliny wrote that “in all gold ore there is some silver” – most ancient silver was extracted from silver-bearing galena, an ore of lead. Silver was separated from lead and other impurities by the process of cupellation, known since the Bronze Age, in which the crushed ore was heated in a crucible, or “cupel,” commonly made of clay. Under intense heat, impurities were vaporized or melted and absorbed into the porous cupel, leaving the silver behind. It was this method that the Phoenicians used to first refine Iberian silver on a large scale, though the native Iberans probably engaged in some silver production before Phoenician contact. Though ancient, the process continued to be refined over time, to the point where Strabo could report that the silver mines at Laurion in Attika were still worked, regardless of their exhaustion, because silver could be extracted from slag that had been discarded centuries before as worthless or unprofitable. Silver mining was performed largely by slaves under the Greeks and Romans; Laurion was worked by slaves in its Athenian heyday, and the famed silver mines at Cartagena employed as many as 40,000 slaves under Roman ownership. While mines like Laurion were typically owned and operated by the state, many Roman silver mines were privately owned (though heavily taxed) until the fall of the republic.

I tried to keep this one slightly briefer. There's a million artifacts and applications of silver, of course, so it can always be expanded.

I made a conscious effort here to include some non Greco-Roman anecdotes. Clearly there’s some crossover in the last section with the lead entry, but as they were produced in much the same manner and in literally the same places, that feels unavoidable; at least I tried to mix up the phrasing.

I am aware that the origin of the Gundestrup Cauldron is disputed, but not feeling qualified to enter that debate, I thought I’d just settle for what seems like a broadly held opinion and let the experts here clarify my statement as needed. It’s a fantastic example of silverwork from the time and seemed like it really merited a mention here. (I also read in the forums at one point that it was part of the inspiration for the Averni symbol, which just made it more necessary).

I’ve got a lot of work to do this month so I may be slowing down a bit, but unless anyone else takes them I’ll be looking next at gold and copper. The nice thing about the metals is that they all sort of segue together; you do research on one and you’re already set up for research on the next one.


*Note: This is a troublesome figure; the amount of silver looted varies dramatically depending on where you read, and seems to rest on a now-lost original document, with the confusion further compounded by later errors and estimates. The figure I quoted is from Julian Bennett, who writes "According to a Byzantine epitomator, using the now lost Getica of Trajan’s physician, T. Statilius Crito, it comprised not less than 5,000,000 lbs of gold and 10,000,000 of silver… And even if it is now accepted that these figures have been inflated tenfold through an error in transcription, the true sum being 500,000 lbs of gold and 1,000,000 lbs of silver, it remains an extraordinary amount." I like having a figure in there, of course, but it might be more accurate to just say "a lot!"