3,400 Years Ago, Egyptians Beat Gold Thinner Than Paper

A sheet of printer paper is about one hundred micrometers thick. Three thousand four hundred years ago a workshop near Luxor was turning solid gold into sheets three tenths of one micrometer thick, using a rounded stone held in one bare hand. This video follows that gold from the quartz veins of Egypt's Eastern Desert and Nubia, through the oldest surviving geological map in the world, and into the goldbeaters' workshop itself. On the way there is a letter from an Assyrian king complaining that gold in Egypt was dirt, and the exchange records that show why he had a point. Then comes the workshop question. If Egypt was that rich in gold, why beat it down to almost nothing? The answer is that a tomb is mostly surface, and surface eats metal. The part that still gets me is at the end. Modern machines beat gold leaf to one tenth of a micrometer. Thirty four centuries of metallurgy bought a gain of three times. And one piece of the Egyptian process has never been found, which is why nobody can claim to have reproduced their leaf. SOURCES AND FURTHER READING Eric D. Nicholson, The Ancient Craft of Gold Beating, Gold Bulletin Nanoscale goldbeating, PNAS Nexus, 2023 Gold and Silver: Relative Values in the Ancient Past, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 2023 Klemm and Klemm, Gold of the Pharaohs, Journal of African Earth Sciences, 2001 The World's Oldest Surviving Geological Map, The Journal of Geology Museo Egizio, Turin, on the gold mine papyrus Royal Society of Chemistry, element entry for gold Which parts are settled and which parts are still argued over, I say so in the narration itself. If you want the other end of this story, the next video is about the oldest worked gold anyone has dug up, and the man it was buried with. Subscribe if you like history where somebody had a real problem and had to solve it with what was in the room. CHAPTERS 0:00 Thinner than the paper in your hand 0:35 Why a dead king had to turn into gold 1:23 The oldest map in the world hunts gold 2:28 The king who called Egypt's gold dirt 4:32 Why beat it down to almost nothing 6:03 Where gold stops behaving like metal 7:51 Thirty four centuries, three times better 9:31 The piece nobody has ever found