sank deep vertical shaft s and extended narrow horizontal
galleries in their pursuit not just of precious metals but also
of ores that contained copper, tin, and arsenic, which they
learned to combine into the fi rst truly useful metal, the alloy
bronze.
Mainland Greece, its islands, and the colonized lands
of the eastern Mediterranean supplied the Greeks of the
Classical and Hellenistic periods (480–31 b.c.e.) with a rich
variety of metals and ores. Th e diffi culty was not in supply
but in discovering the ore-bearing veins, since the princi-
pal prospecting technique available to the Greeks was to
search for surface indications of what might lie beneath, a
particularly unreliable method, as the ancients themselves
knew well. Despite the haphazard nature of their discov-
eries, they had productive mines throughout the eastern
Mediterranean: gold mines are known of in the northern
regions of Macedonia and Th race; gold and silver were both
mined on the Aegean islands of Th ásos and Sífnos; and sil-
ver, which might have been imported for some time from
Asia Minor (the coasts and high central plateau of Turkey),
became available locally when the Athenians reopened and
expanded the shallow Mycenaean workings at Laurium,
where the precious metal was actually an impurity in ga-
lena, a lead sulfi de.
Copper was mined on Cyprus and at the town of Khalkís
on Euboea, both places whose names derive from the Greek
words for copper and bronze. Oxides and carbonates were
found in deposits close to the surface, though when these
were exhausted the Greeks dug deeper to recover copper sul-
fi des, all of which would be combined with tin extracted from
its ore, cassiterite, which soon began to be imported from the
distant mines of Cornwall in Britain. And, fi nally, the metal
that defi nes the period—iron—was found in quantity in ores
from the Aegean islands, Anatolia, and Cyprus.
Knowledge of Greek mining operations comes from both
the workings of the Laurium silver mines, which have been
cleared and closely studied, and from ancient writers (more
oft en Roman than Greek) who described the extraction tech-
niques that changed little from the Bronze Age to the end of
antiquity. While any miner would prefer horizontal shaft s
dug into the sides of hills and mountains, through which the
movement of laborers and material was much easier and safer,
necessity forced the Greeks to dig vertical shaft s, about 7 feet
square in section, to depths sometimes exceeding 328 feet,
from which cramped galleries as low as roughly 3 feet high
were driven horizontally to follow the veins of ore, their roofs
supported by pillars of unexcavated stone and only rarely by
shoring with wooden timbers. In this confi ned environment
miners (who were almost always slaves, since no free per-
son would choose to expose himself to such life-threatening
dangers) lay for hours on their backs, sides, or stomachs and
chipped away at the rock face with a tool kit of iron picks,
chisels, and hammers, without even primitive safety equip-
ment and with only the most basic illumination from torches
and oil lamps.
Fire, poor ventilation, and absence of drainage all pre-
sented hazards. Documentary sources reveal that the ore-
bearing rock face was oft en heated by an open fi re and then
doused with water (or vinegar), the sudden change of tem-
perature causing the rock to fracture: one can hardly imagine
the cumulative eff ect of the heat, the scalding steam, and the
fl ying shards of ore. Fires were also set to create a downdraft
in the shaft s to draw in air for ventilation, when natural con-
vection or surface fans made of linen sheets were insuffi cient.
Th e Greeks appear not to have introduced artifi cial drainage
to their mines, which (as at Laurium) were sunk only to the
water table. Generally speaking, mines in the Greek world
were controlled by the state (Athens, in the case of Laurium),
which issued concession leases to private companies for terms
of three to seven years, some of which survive to give detailed
information about the administration of these operations.
During the regressive dark ages that followed the col-
lapse of the Mycenaean Bronze Age (ca. 1100 b.c.e.), the
Greeks’ skill at monumental construction was temporarily
abandoned, until the city-states recovered in the eighth cen-
tury b.c.e. and began to replace with stone structures those
temples and public buildings that had, for several centuries,
been modestly constructed of wood, clay, and terra-cotta. Th e
building stone was, ideally, quarried near the city, to miti-
gate the labor and expense of transportation; for this reason,
Athens made use of the fi ne marble from nearby Mount Pen-
delikón, both for buildings (including most of those on the
Acropolis) and stone sculpture.
Sources like the Greek historian and geographer Pausa-
nias of the second century c.e. give information about the loca-
tion of important quarries and supplement the archaeological
evidence from known sites. Th e quarries were almost always
open pits, so the workers avoided most of the life-threaten-
ing dangers experienced by miners. Th e rectangular blocks
were fi rst defi ned by shallow outlines cut with iron chisels;
wooden wedges were then inserted in deep sockets cut along
the grooves and hammered down, to fracture the stone along
its natural lines of cleavage. Th e blocks were removed with
levers, leaving steps that made continuing access to the rock
faces easier. Th ey were roughly fi nished on site using ham-
mers, chisels, and hard balls of dolomite (a kind of limestone
or marble) to smooth out rough patches and then transported
to the building site for fi nal fi nishing and erection.
Despite the importance of salt in Greek antiquity, when—
together with curing—it was one of the essential means of
preserving food (there being no artifi cial means of cooling in
the ancient world), surprisingly little is known about where
and how it was generally obtained. Jewish law had required
salt to be added to all sacrifi ces. Homer (ninth to eighth cen-
tury b.c.e.) records the use of salt for seasoning and gives it
the epithet “holy.” Later Greeks saw the serving of salt as an
important token of friendship. In Egypt salt pans were con-
structed for the evaporation of seawater. Th ere was a fl ourish-
ing trade in salt from the desert oases well into the Hellenistic
Period. Salt, like drinking water, was considered such a ne-748 mining, quarrying, and salt making: Greece