Art & Culture

Civilizations Introduction

For 5,000 years gold has been appreciated, not just for its beauty, often associated with the blaze of the sun by early civilizations, but for the ease with which it could be worked into ornaments, even by primitive craftsmen. Those ornaments were not just a symbol of wealth and power for the living, but also were often buried to accompany men and women into the Afterlife. Since gold is so durable, they have survived to provide us with a unique record of ancient civilizations, especially when the gold was cast as flowers or animals or embossed or engraved with scenes of hunting or fighting; a way of life captured not in a painting or a photograph, but in gold.

This section describes not only 12 major civilizations that made significant contributions to the goldsmiths’ art, but lists nearly fifty museums in twenty countries that have either collections of gold artifacts from one or more of these civilizations or are currently mounting special exhibitions on gold. Our gold library/history and gold library/jewellery sections also list many books about these civilizations and the gold they produced.

The main civilizations are:

• Sumer, in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) 2800 – 2370 BC
• Egypt, Middle & New Kingdoms, 2133 – 1085 BC
• Minoan, Crete, 2000 – 1450 BC
• Mycenæ, Greece, 1600 – 1100 BC
• The Etruscans, Italy, 700 – 300 BC
• The Romans, Italy, 300 BC – 400 AD
• Byzantine Empire, Turkey, 330 – 1453
• Medieval World, Western Europe, 500 – 1400
• The Renaissance, Italy 1400 – 1600
• Renaissance Goldsmiths, Italy, 1500 – 1600
• Pre-Columbian, Central & South America, 1200 BC – 1450 AD
• Asante, Africa pre-1500 – 1900 AD

Millenium in Gold

The evolution of gold over the last 1000 years is almost the story of the millennium itself. It embraces the establishment of city and nation states, whose rulers controlled the minting of gold coins in their image as a symbol of power, the growth of great trading centres like Venice, Amsterdam and London, and the opening up of new frontiers in Africa, Brazil, Siberia, California, Australia and Canada in pursuit of fresh sources.

In the beginning, the Crusades of the 12th and 13th centuries, bringing pilgrims and traders in their wake, nourished the interchange of gold, which Europe lacked, and silver, which the east always sought. The Mediterranean world was the hub. By 1300, Venice was the gold market, with a daily price fixing and mint making gold ducats that were as universally accepted as the British sovereign 600 years later. Camel caravans brought African gold across the Sahara, new gold mines opened in Hungary. European mints coined up to 170,000 ounces annually by 1350, a record until gold from the Americas arrived 200 years later.