How New York City Got Its Juicy Nickname “The Big Apple” — And What It Means To The World

 

By Brian Johnston

An ancient belief holds that as the sun rotated around the earth on its daily journey it spun gold into rocks, imbuing them with divine and magical power. Today, we might know it is the earth that rotates, but gold still has as much to fascinate and inspire us as it did in pagan times. Brian Johnston looks into the history of this most-prized metal.    

 

Gold: we lust after it and admire it; we bestow gold as the highest reward in sporting contests; we use it for our wedding rings. We speak of golden opportunities and golden rules, and little children aspire to be good as gold. Gold, which as every Irishman knows lives in a crock at the end of the rainbow, is the ultimate treasure.

Every major civilisation across the world has prized gold and produced objects of beauty from yellow metal. It was first worked in Egypt and Mesopotamia six thousand years ago. To the Pharaohs, descendants of the sun god Ra, gold symbolised the sun's rays and was highly prized.

The funerary monuments, sarcophagi, and death masks of all Egypt's rulers were plated with gold; today the most famous example is the splendid mask of Tutankhamun. The Egyptians acquired gold through trade with various lands, including Punt in what is now Ethiopia and Eritrea. The walls of King Amenhotep II's tomb recount how two chiefs arrived in Thebes from Punt, bringing with them quantities of gold, as well as other luxuries such as ebony, ostrich feathers, and animal skins.

Throughout biblical times gold retained its fascination and religious connections. One of the more famous biblical incidents recounts how the Queen of Sheba travelled to Jerusalem to visit King Solomon. In order to curry favour she brought with her 120 talents of gold, 200 shields piled with more gold, and another 300 shields full of silver - a gift scholars have calculated would be worth US$20 million at today's prices. The stupendous golden donation clearly impressed, because when the Queen of Sheba returned home she was pregnant with the future Menelik I, founder of the Ethiopian imperial dynasty.

The ancient Romans were also aware of the ability of gold to buy favours. Poet Sextus Propertius wrote cynically: "This is the golden age. The greatest rewards come from gold. By gold love is won; faith is destroyed; by gold, justice is bought' – a comment that has certainly stood the test of time. The Greeks were fascinated by the legend of King Midas who, when granted a wish from the gods opted to have everything he touched turn to gold. This incautious request was his undoing from the gods, opted to have everything he touched turn to gold.

This incautious request was his undoing: before he could eat, his food turned to gold, and when he touched his daughter she too was transformed. Soon Midas' wealth was so great his kingdom attracted the covetous attention of neighbours and the King poisoned himself as his citadel was taken. (Legend does not explain how the poison too wasn't turned to gold.).

The legend has some basis in reality: King Midas ruled over Phrygia in central Turkey, a place where gold is commonly found in the rivers. Today anyone said to have the Midas touch is a person who makes a quick profit with ease.

Far more sensible in their pursuit of gold were the Axumites of northern Ethiopia. The Kingdom of Axum (or Aksum) was an important trading state that flourished from the first to the sixth centuries, and gold was an important commodity. Egyptian tea merchant Kosmos Indikopleustes reported his amazement at the 'silent trade' conducted by the Axumites in the Blue Nile region.

At night the Axumite traders laid out meat, salt, and iron before retiring to their camp. The locals then came forth and placed gold beside the goods they wished to obtain. The next morning, if the Axumites were satisfied with the amount of gold offered, they packed up and set off home. Thus business was done without either side uttering a word, and certainly without a war.

Gold was coveted for its mystical appeal and rarity, but gold is also a very practical metal that is easy to work with yet virtually imperishable. It was developed as the basis of economic stability for these very reasons since coins made of gold were easy to produce yet very durable. The earliest known gold coins were being produced in Lydia (now part of Turkey) in the seventh century BC.

Lydia's King Croesus issued oblong-shaped gold coins showing the heads of a lion and a bull and has remained famous ever since in the expression 'as rich as Croesus'. From here the notion of coins spread into neighbouring countries. In 500 BC Darius, the Great of Persia became the first ruler to stamp his portrait on coins. Alexander the Great also issued gold coins, and much of his conquests were concerned with controlling new sources of metal.

He brought mining engineers with him on his campaigns and took over much of the known world's productive goldfields. He buried vast amounts of the accumulated wealth to lighten the load of his army; only a fraction of the horde has ever been discovered.

Axum was another ancient kingdom that issued its own currency in gold and silver from the reigns of King Endybis and King Aphilas onwards. Over 500 different coins have been identified, well over 100 of them minted from gold. The coins were minted at Adulis and in Arabia (the southern part of which was under Axumite control) and sported portraits of the monarchs between palm leaves and ears of grain.

They were inscribed in Greek and Ge'ez, the first written language of Ethiopia. Coins were struck for hundreds of years but with the downfall of Axum, coins seem to have disappeared from Ethiopia for many centuries. Today in Axum hordes of precious gold still occasionally come to light in the ruins of the temples and palaces from its days of greatness.

Gold became the established material for coinage After the decline of Rome Byzantium established a pure gold currency, the bezant, which was the foundation of their long empire and still holds the record for the world's longest surviving currency (eight centuries). Gold was also minted by the Arabs (stamped with verses from the Quran, since Islam forbids human images) and Europeans.

The Venetian ducat and florin of Florence became the most important currencies in Europe until replaced by the Spanish doubloon. Spain's conquests of Mexico and South America enabled them to dominate the world's production of gold, and it remained the wealthiest country in the world for well over a century.

In Africa too the greatness of nations has risen and fallen on the supply of gold. Ghana became one of the most powerful trading nations on the continent thanks to its near monopoly of gold but its power began to wane in the eleventh century. In the late thirteenth century, the Kingdom of Mali emerged as one of the world's largest empires.

When its greatest ruler Mansa Musa made a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, he took with him a retinue of 600,000 each carrying a staff of gold, and a further twelve tons of gold loaded on eighty camels. Mansa Musa gave so much gold away as he passed through Egypt that he almost wrecked the entire later, not the economy. Fifty years surprisingly, Mali's gold mines had begun.

The demise of the gold coin came in the sixteenth century as demand far outstripped supply. Instead of actual coins credit notes certifying the wealth of the holder were issued. Eventually, such notes were recognised as having a value in themselves, but monetary systems still based the amount of notes issued on an actual amount of gold held by a bank or government. This gold standard wasn't abandoned until the nineteenth century.

Today few gold coins are issued (most are collector's items, such as the South African krugerrand and Canadian maple leaf) but the names of many currencies such as the pound, rouble, and lira recall that their value in gold was once established by weight: the pound.

Gold coins might have gone the way of the dodo but gold itself has scarcely declined in importance since it remains the basis for much of the world's trade and financial transactions. Amazingly enough, only 1O0,000 tonnes of gold have been mined since the beginning of human history - enough to fill one large ship. A tenth of this belongs to the US government and lies in Fort Knox, but despite popular imagination, this is not the largest hoard of gold in the world. That lies in the vaults of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York and amounts to some 40,000 tonnes deposited by seventy different nations.

On a much smaller scale, people the world over still hoard their savings in gold. In Morocco a bride wears a golden belt as part of her dowry; a gold chain hung with coins serves a similar purpose in Saudi Arabia. Indians are so fond of saving gold that India has become the world's largest gold market, and gold also forms the basis of many northern African's savings.

Nor is it only developing countries that prize the metal: gold bars are bought in large numbers by the Swiss and are displayed in the windows of many a Swiss bank. Gold, it seems, will never lose its fascination, and even if we don't believe it's spun by the sun - well, we all still continue to worship it anyway.