The Metals in Antiquity: The Huxley Memorial Lecture for 1912 (Classic Reprint) - Tapa blanda

Excerpt from The Metals in Antiquity: The Huxley Memorial Lecture for 1912

Br william gowland, Assoc. Emeritus Professor of Metallurgy at the Royal School of Mines.

The only records available to us of man before he became acquainted with metals are written in the remains which have been unearthed from time to time in the caves or sites where he led a precarious existence, in the districts over which he wandered, in the mounds or places in which he was interred, or in the debris of terrestrial denudation, river gravels and the like. The same, too, is true of later man during the early metal ages. But as time rolls on and the ruder arts and usages gradually develop into a civilization approaching, and indeed in some respects equalling, or even excelling that of our own day, the evidence afforded by the remains is supplemented by those records of the past which we find in the clay tablets of Chaldaea and Assyria, the papyri and inscriptions of Egypt and the literature of ancient Greece and Rome.

As regards metals, however, the chief and often the only evidence on which reliance can be placed is that derived from the same sour lages, viz., the objects and articles which excavations bring often assumed that before man became acquainted with metals he was a mere savage but little superior to the wild animals of his time, but that this view is entirely erroneous, certainly as regards late neolithic man, is incontestably proved by the evidence presented so clearly to us by the vestiges which have been laid bare of his culture. And mode of life. He was a farmer, kept domestic animals, was acquainted with the arts of weaving, the manufacture of pottery, his dwellings were constructed with considerable skill, and at his death he was buried with ceremonial rites. Such were the men who were the discoverers of metals and the first metallurgists. They were, in fact, men possessing greater intelligence and a higher culture than is usually attributed to them, and if we ourselves were deprived of metals I hardly think that we could surpass them in the exigencies or even the arts of everyday life.

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