Historical Mining in the EB Era

[QwertyMIDX]

Well the mines at Laurion produced silver, but yeah it was quite a bit. It's about 75 drachma per citizen with a high estimate of that population group (at its hieght). Add on the tribute money Athens was extroting from her "allies" and you can figure out how they paided people to come to assemblies and sit on juries and how they built all the now legendary civic buildings.

[O'ETAIPOS]

And, do not forget they used it to build, and maintain around 200 triremes.

[QwertyMIDX]

Yeah, although those were mostly paid for by wealthy athenians (either individual or in small groups). They also paid for lots of the public festivites in Athens like hiring choruses to sign and the like. It was sort of an unoffical 'tax the rich' system.

[Zaknafien]

The Romans took mining to a level not rivaled until the Industrial Revolution in Iberia. The silver mines annexed from Carthage were handed over to the publicani in the 2nd century BC, and with those a single mine might have tunnels that stretched more than a hundred square miles, and provide upwards of 40,000 slaves with a living death. Writers wrote of the pall of smog that hung over the landscape from the smelters and giant chimneys.

Measurements of lead in the ice of Greenland's glaciers show a staggering increase in concentration during this period, bearing witness to the volumes of smoke produces by the ore mines.

Experts have estimated that for every ton of silver being gorged out of the earth, over ten thousand tons of rock had to be excevated---it has also been estimated, that by the early 1st century BC, the Roman mints were using fifty tons of silver each year.

[QwertyMIDX]

I forget where it is but one roman writer mentions birds dying when they flew into the smog clouds over the Iberian smelters.