Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/97

Rh many places where it is not profitable to mine, that afford washings of tin of considerable richness. "We thus see that the metal was useful, and that there was a sufficiency of rich, easily-worked ores. The conditions were, then, favorable for a long blossoming of the civilization of the bronze age.

The oldest historical information on this subject is furnished to us by the Egyptian inscriptions. From them we conclude that that highly civilized nation was in possession of metals from the beginning of its history. While the Indian Indra appears armed with the thunderbolt, "Akman" of meteoric stone, and the German god, Thor, carries his stone Mjőlnir, the Egyptian gods are provided with metallic weapons; an evidence that the people were already acquainted with metals. Moreover, we find the spear designated after the name of a metal in the earliest inscriptions. As we say of weapons, "the sharp steel," as the Greeks and Romans described their weapons as of bronze and later of iron, so the Egyptians designated their lances by the name of bronze, and when describing bronze gave the sign for a metal, and explained it by the addition of that for a lance. Bronze was the prevailing metal. The metallic vessels, tools, and weapons of the ancient empire are represented in red, not in blue. It was the same essentially in the new empire, although the Egyptians had then become acquainted with articles of iron, and had obtained them by conquest and trade.

We meet this form of civilization again in reviewing the history of Mesopotamia and Syria. Babylon ruled over an alluvial plain, and was obliged to get all its metals from abroad by trade or conquest; Assyria possessed copper and iron within its own territory, but was dependent on other countries for tin. The countries whence this metal was obtained in antiquity were Midian, the Hindoo-Koosh, Farther India, and, at a later period, Spain and Britain; but the Phœnicians managed and controlled the trade in the indispensable mixed metal. Inasmuch as one of the essential metals was not found within the territories of the old nations of civilization, it will not do to ascribe the discovery of the manufacture of bronze to them. We must unquestionably look for the metallurgists of primeval times in other countries; and, in fact, traditions are not wanting to support such an assumption. The Hittites are mentioned by the Egyptians as the iron-workers of ancient times. The Mosaic books mention Tubal-Cain (a personified people) as the inventors and masters of metallurgy; and the Greeks designate, not the Phœnicians nor the Babylonians or Egyptians, but the Phrygians, as the ancient masters of art in bronze and iron, and praise the Chalybes of the Black Sea as distinguished steel-smiths.

Reviewing the facts we have so far adduced, we find that we have ascertained, first, that the ancient nations of civilization were predominantly in a bronze age; second, that they were dependent on other nations for the production of bronze; and, third, that peoples strange