Jasmine Freema6 Essay example

Submitted By Freemanjasmine
Words: 1144
Pages: 5

Jasmine Freeman
Period : 1a/Chemistry
1.6.14

Gold

Who was gold discovered ?
Because gold is dispersed widely throughout the geologic world, its discovery occurred to many different groups in many different locales. And nearly everyone who found it was impressed with it, and so was the developing culture in which they lived. Gold was the first metal widely known to our species . Early civilizations equated gold with gods and rulers, and gold was sought in their name and dedicated to their glorification. Humans almost intuitively place a high value on gold, equating it with power, beauty, and the cultural elite. And since gold is widely distributed all over the globe, we find this same thinking about gold throughout ancient and modern civilizations everywhere.
Gold, beauty, and power have always gone together. 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. This was a time when gold was highly valued, but had not yet become money itself. Rather, it was owned by the powerful and well-connected, or made into objects of worship, or used to decorate sacred locations. Early artisans of the time period used gold to fashion jewelry and other adornments. Golden artifacts have been found in the Balkans that predate the Christian Era by four millennia.
. This is demonstrated by the extraordinary efforts made to obtain it. 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. 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 Greek geographer, Strabo, shared the ancient methods of refining and extracting the gold from ore, including a smelting process called "Fire-Sitting". It is also believed that the Greek legend of the Golden Fleece that was pursued by Jason and the Argonauts may have referred to a practice of using fleece to trap gold dust in placer deposits, an early form of screening for gold.
Gold, measured out, became money. 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. Gold gave rise to the concept of money itself: portable, private, and permanent. Gold (and silver) in standardized coins came to replace barter arrangements, and made trade in the Classic period much easier.

Gold was money in ancient Greece. The Greeks mined for gold throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East regions by 550 B.C., and both Plato and Aristotle wrote about gold and had theories about its origins. 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.
Gold is free metal in veins of quartz . About 5g of gold is from metric ton of gold bearing rock . Gold can be produced to transmit light . Gold is used on the outside surfaces of satellites because it resists corrosion . Golds high electrical and thermal conductivity make it good to plate contacts in microcircuits . Pure gold is alloyed to make it harder and more durable . Gold alloys are safe to use as fillings for teeth because gold is highly unreactive . What is gold made of ? Gold is made up of ores. Gold ore are often found together with quartz or sulphide minerals such as pyrite. Native gold is mined in the form of free flakes, grains or larger nuggets that have