How did gold change world history?
Ibn Khaldun
Beyond the forests and rivers, in a land untrodden by strangers, there is a city of gold, its roads and houses sparkling with a captivating brilliance under the sun. Its courtyards are surrounded by torches whose flames overwhelm the daylight, reflecting on the body of the tribe's king, covered in gold dust from head to toe, to shine with the golden glow of the gods, as he prepares to dive into the waters of Lake Guatavita, located in Bogotá, the current capital of Colombia. The city is El Dorado, which means covered in gold in Spanish, and was first mentioned in the epic poem composed by Juan de Castellanos and published under the title "The Elegy of the Honest Men of the Andes" as one of dozens of tales that the first Spanish conquistadors brought back from their journeys to the New World. Despite the lack of conclusive evidence of its existence, the legend of El Dorado ignited the imagination of explorers, propelling them on a wild adventure in search of gold that indirectly changed history, doubled the size of the map of the Earth, and influenced anthropology, economics, and religious thought. In his book Gold: The Competition for the World’s Most Seductive Mineral, Matthew Hart describes it as “swallowing up the Inca civilization whole and vomiting it up in coinage.”
It was not only the gold of the New World that attracted the greed of the Europeans. On the other hand, tales of African gold and its treasures enchanted the Europeans, and these tales were crowned by the pilgrimage of King Ashraf Mansa Musa, Emperor of Mali, in 1324.
According to a number of historians, Mansa Musa set out with a huge entourage estimated at around 60,000 men, and his caravan included 80 camels, each carrying 300 pounds of gold. During his journey, Mansa Musa was so generous in his gifts that his spending led to a decrease in the value of gold, according to the historian Taqi al-Din al-Maqrizi in his book “Al-Suluk li-Ma’rifat Dawlat al-Muluk” when he said: “Mansa Musa came, intending to perform the pilgrimage to the Sacred House, and he stayed under the pyramids for three days as a guest.. He got off and took out a lot of gold to buy what he wanted of slave girls, clothes and other things, until the price of the dinar fell by six dirhams.”
The price of gold in the surrounding cities was affected by this decline, as this was the first time that one man controlled the gold market in the Mediterranean basin, which naturally reached Europe, drawing attention to African gold, with its surrounding legends about trees that grow gold in those distant lands, just as the legend of El Dorado attracted the attention of explorers to the Americas. While the conquests of Spanish explorers extended for nearly two centuries, the arrival of Portuguese explorers to the coasts of Africa was just a step, resulting in a long struggle between colonial and new imperial powers that continued until the twentieth century. Behind all these struggles stands gold, that shiny yellow metal, which humans have revered in ancient times as a heavenly metal associated with the gods, before showing another face that stimulates human greed. So how did gold combine the two values, spiritual and material, and between this and that, how did it shape the history of the world and redraw its maps? How has it remained, from the dawn of history to the present day, the most resilient element in the test of value, while economic fluctuations hit different parts of the planet?
Gold is a heavenly metal
If we go back to the moment gold was formed, we would find that most modern research has settled on the presence of its atoms in the dust of the solar system. In fact, scientists now confirm that this dust came as a visitor to the sun's surroundings from a stellar explosion or a collision of dense neutron stars that occurred in the sun's surroundings. According to the scientific explanation, violent events of this type are what produce the gold present in this universe.
Gold traveled to planet Earth billions of years ago after colliding with asteroids that left deposits of minerals that settled in its interior. However, the settlement of gold and other minerals in the mantle layer (*) instead of the planet's core remained a mystery that puzzled scientists until just last year, when scientists John Korenaga, Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Yale University, and Simon Marchi, a researcher at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, presented their theory published in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" about the existence of a region of the mantle layer with dynamic properties that surround the falling minerals so that the shallow part of the mantle layer melts and the deeper part remains solid.
It is interesting to note that there are ancient echoes in human thought about the association between gold and the sun, which was a goddess in many ancient religions. We find that gold is the flesh and blood of the god "Ra", symbolized by the ancient Egyptians as the sun disk, the excrement of the sun goddess among the Aztecs, the sweat of Inti, the sun god among the Incas, the color of Amaterasu, the sun goddess in the Japanese Shinto religion, and Apollo, the sun god in his golden chariot among the Greeks. This association also emerges at the linguistic level; if we consider the symbol for gold "Au" in the periodic table, we find that it is derived from its Latin name "Aurum", meaning "yellow", which is derived from the ancient Greek word "aurora" or glowing dawn.
But how did humans reach this connection between gold and the sun thousands of years ago? Is it only due to its physical properties and its bright yellow color that resembles its rays, or to its ability to survive and defy time like the sun that rises every morning since the beginning of creation?
A question whose exact answer is unknown, just as the date of the first human discovery of gold is unknown, but evidence indicates that it is one of the oldest metals discovered by humans, and it seems that rarity, beauty, and resistance to damage are all factors that linked it to the concepts of holiness and immortality, so it was initially associated with religious rituals, and with the development of civilizations, kings and clerics adorned themselves with it to add credibility to their holiness, resembling the gods from whom they derived authority.
In the 1970s, a digger in Varna, Bulgaria, discovered a collection of gold coins by chance, and kept them in his shoebox until he was able to hand them over to the authorities. This coincidence led to the discovery of a series of graves containing more than three thousand gold coins dating back to around 6500 BC, making them the oldest pieces of gold ever made.
Archaeologists spent 15 years after this coincidence exploring more than three hundred graves, but what is striking is that three-quarters of the gold was found in just four graves, reflecting an early awareness of the concept of social classes, and indicating the spiritual and ritual value of gold that exceeded its material value. The nobles of Varna preferred to take their gold with them to the afterlife rather than bequeath it to their children. Can we consider this a kind of early association between gold and the desire to own, or did the spiritual value of gold at that time exceed its material value, which man later recognized?
Gold has been associated with religion throughout time, and we can see hundreds of examples in various ancient civilizations, in which man was keen to bury gold with the dead, and perhaps this was a symbol of immortality because it is an indestructible metal, or a sign and reminder to the gods in the afterlife of the status of the deceased in his earthly life.
The use of gold was transferred to the heavenly religions, which is explained from a practical perspective by Rebecca Zorach, Professor of Art History at Northwestern University in the United States, and filmmaker Michael W. Phillips in their book "Gold: Nature and Culture" that it enhanced the religious experience visually, in churches and cathedrals of the Middle Ages, for example, gold leaves reflected the light of candles on the walls and ceilings, and around the icons of saints; which deepened the feeling of spirituality and holiness.
In Islamic art, despite the restrictions that the arts of photography witnessed, the aesthetics of calligraphy emerged, in which gold took its high position. The blue Qur’an written in Tunisia in the fourth century AH is a beautiful example of the aesthetics of using gold in Islamic artistic expression. Its letters were written in gilded Kufic script on parchment dyed indigo blue. With the development of Islamic art, the use of gold in miniatures also appeared. If we visit the French National Library in Paris, specifically the Oriental Collection Hall, we will find the manuscript “Miraj Nameh” from the 15th century AD, which contains 57 amazing paintings that deal with the journey of the Ascension, and the topics of Heaven, Hell, and Resurrection from the Islamic perspective, using gold in the paintings in a beautiful way to depict the gates of Heaven, and the journey of the Prophet Muhammad, may God bless him and grant him peace, to the Lote Tree of the Limit.
From the power of heaven to the power of earth
Despite the early association between gold and wealth and influence, its transformation into a quantitative measure of wealth did not crystallize clearly before the invention of gold coins, which were a turning point in the relationship between humans and gold, after which it moved into the hands of the public after it was the preserve of gods and kings.
Barter was the oldest means of trade exchange, but the development of human societies highlighted the need for another way to preserve wealth. At first, humans used items from their local environments such as beads, feathers, and pieces of obsidian, which evolved into what scientists call "Precoin" or "pre-coins", which were mostly made of metals, but lacked the most important feature of the concept of currency that was later established, which is that it be certified with an inscription approved by the authority to be used as money.
History was on a date with a turning point, with the appearance of the first unified gold coin in the Kingdom of Lydia in Asia Minor (present-day Turkey) about 600 years BC.
The innovation of currencies quickly spread throughout the world. They were made of a metal of agreed value and certified by the seal of the authorities, which gave them reliability that allowed for the expansion of trade between different civilizations. Over time, coins developed and kings realized their value. They became a means of propaganda to prove authority in distant kingdoms. The image of the ruler appeared on them. The Arabs used Byzantine and Sassanian coins of gold and silver before Islam. The dirham and dinar were mentioned in the Holy Quran, and zakat was imposed on them. Early attempts to give them an Islamic character were known during the era of the Rashidun Caliphate, by adding phrases with an Islamic character such as the two testimonies. However, the first purely Arab coins were minted during the reign of Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan. The attached image shows an Umayyad dinar bearing a picture of the caliph holding a sword.
As the Islamic state expanded, its currency replaced Byzantine currencies and became a major currency recognized throughout the world, both in areas of Islamic influence and outside them in Christian Europe.
Gold reshapes history...and geography
In his book "The Open Veins of South America", Eduardo Galeano recounts how the Spanish conquest of the New World was cloaked in religion and supported by the Church, under the pretext of spreading the word of God and expanding his kingdoms on earth, while the real goal lurked under the cloak of false religion, which was greed for the gold and treasures of the New World, so that gold became a magic key to both the gates of heaven in the sky and the gates of capitalism on earth.
This was not the first time that the authorities used religion as a bridge to reach gold. When Constantine embraced Christianity and made it the official religion, he stripped pagan temples throughout the empire of gold. In Henry VIII's revolution against the Catholic Church - although its motives were not originally financial - some of the country's economic problems found a solution after the confiscation of the property of Catholic churches and monasteries.
Anyway, let us return to Spain, whose history and the history of the world as a whole was marked by the year 1492. On the one hand, the Spaniards were able to subjugate Granada, after a war that lasted seven years and exhausted the royal treasury. On the other hand, that was the year in which Christopher Columbus’s first voyages of exploration were launched, with the support of Ferdinand and Isabella, the kings of Spain. According to historian Peter Bernstein in his book “The Power of Gold: The Story of His Tyranny over Hearts and Minds,” Europe’s thirst for gold was ignited after a series of natural disasters and epidemics that dug their claws into the continent’s body during the fourteenth century, killing more than a third of the population, to begin a series of European invasions to explore the New World and seek its treasures. While indigenous civilizations such as the Incas and Aztecs viewed gold as a metal with spiritual and ritual value, the Spanish saw it as nothing more than money waiting to be melted down. The Spanish invaders plundered all the exquisite gold pieces they found, the product of more than four centuries of civilization, and melted them down into ingots and coins stamped with the Spanish royal coat of arms. Their stated pretext was to destroy the symbols of paganism, but it was an argument that concealed greed and a colonial desire for the deliberate destruction of cultural memory, a desire that we still see repeated in various colonial contexts to this day.
But colonization, the plundering of their wealth, and the destruction of their civilization were not the most severe things that the indigenous peoples faced. Millions of them lost their lives in a long series of genocidal campaigns, massacres, and diseases that the invaders deliberately introduced, such as smallpox (which their immune systems were not prepared to resist), and millions were transported to Europe to work as slaves.
On the other hand, despite the huge influx of gold into Spain, the country experienced waves of recession, declining production, and increasing rates of consumption. Foreign merchants replaced Muslims and Jews after their expulsion, so money flowed abroad, and the size of debts reached 65 percent of revenues in 1543, so that the Spanish became, as Eduardo Galeano described them, "owners of the cow whose milk others drink."
Beyond their economic effects, the European wars had countless effects on human history. The series of catastrophes that Europe faced during the fourteenth century had spread the idea of the approaching end of the world, and then it was multiplied with the discovery of an entire continent not mentioned in the Bible, to begin waves of liberation of ideas and science from the authority of the Church. On the other hand, according to Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Finn Sievert Nielsen in their book "History of Anthropology", despite the moral ambiguity inherent in the Europeans' view of indigenous societies, their discovery of the existence of the other, and the books that dealt with these societies, all of this is considered a seed on which contemporary anthropology relied on its legacy, although it did not become an academic discipline before the nineteenth century and did not take its current form until the twentieth century.
Karl Marx sees in "Capital" that the discovery of gold in America and the accompanying campaigns of extermination and slavery, are all factors indicating the beginning of the era of capitalist production.
Gold Rush
While the Spanish conquests were blessed with the cloak of religion, and supported by royal swords, prospectors went to California as individuals armed only with a spirit of adventure and a frenzied appetite to reach gold in one of the largest mass migrations in history.
J. Wilson Marshall did not know that he was about to change history when he found gold deposits in 1848 on the farm of Swiss immigrant John Sutter in California. The two men tried to cover up the news, but it spread throughout the country, and hundreds of thousands of people dreaming of getting rich flocked to it, and the population increased from about 15,000 to more than 300,000 by 1852. The dreams of the ambitious immigrant Sutter were shattered under the feet of the modern American dream, whose first historical building blocks were laid by the "Gold Rush."
To understand the economic impact of the gold rush in numbers, it is enough to know that the amount of gold produced over the 10 years since the discovery of gold in California is equal to the production of all gold sources over more than three and a half centuries until 1848. The economic impact was not limited to this, as the roots of the modern transportation and communication revolution go back to this stage, as the need for quick access to gold sources led to an increase in the length of railroad lines from 9,000 miles in 1850 to more than 30,000 within 10 years, and telegraph lines extended to connect the entire United States, and many small, primitive towns were transformed into major cities.
At this stage, the culture of entrepreneurship was established, and the concept of the American dream based on quick individual wealth crystallized, which was not the fate of gold prospectors alone. On the contrary, some of those whose elegant clothes were not touched by the mine dust were able to seize the opportunity, most notably the entrepreneur Samuel Brannan, who learned early about the discovery of gold and rushed to buy mining tools at low prices, and then prospectors flocked to buy them from him at many times their price. The influence of California gold extended far, even to our wardrobes. The jeans that most of us own date back to this period, and were invented by Levi Strauss and his partner Jacob Davis when they noticed the need of prospectors for durable pants that could withstand the hardships of working in the mines. The social psychological view of this phenomenon allows us to shed light on the relationship between people and opportunities for wealth, with its surrounding conflicting feelings of hope and risk that reach the point of obsession. The promise of wealth and freedom from the existing social system has intoxicated hundreds of thousands of people, who have abandoned their stable professional and family lives, and moved to California hoping for a new start, even after the opportunities for wealth there have diminished over time.
The gold rush is a capitalist phenomenon, a model that can be generalized in other contexts, and has been exploited by many marketing and commercial entities. Today, the term "gold rush" is used in business and emerging markets as a metaphor to describe the activity surrounding a new opportunity or market, and what characterizes it from a sudden influx of investment and competition to achieve quick gains, with all the risks surrounding rapid growth. The most famous recent examples of this are the rush to the e-commerce market in the 1990s, as well as the cryptocurrency market today.
But despite everything, it seems that gold always carries a curse hidden behind its dreamy luster. The devastating impact of the California Gold Rush on indigenous communities, including their extermination, and on the environment, cannot be ignored, as hydraulic mining operations and toxic mercury waste left a heavy legacy on the environment that is still present today.
Our view of gold as a precious metal raises a philosophical question about value: is it derived from the essence of the element or is it linked to what societies have agreed upon? This is a question that we can forcefully ask when looking at the history of gold in Africa, where its people gave gold to traders in exchange for a commodity that we may see today as one of the least valuable and expensive commodities: salt!
Arab and European traders used to exchange salt for gold with the indigenous people of West African kingdoms, and salt used to preserve food was rare in Africa, to the point that an ounce of it was worth an ounce of gold or sometimes more, as historian Peter Bernstein notes.
The question of value arises in particular when looking at the painful paradox related to gold in Africa: despite the presence of more than 42 percent of the world's known gold reserves in Africa, this is not reflected in the levels of economic growth, development, and daily life of the majority of the population. This is what Ainsley Ibra, an economic researcher at the University of Sydney, called in her book "Governing Gold Mining in Africa": the resource curse.
African gold has teased the imagination of Europe, flirting with dreams of wealth through tales of salt merchants, news of Mansa Musa's journey and other tales. The colonial powers' attempts to control Africa's wealth began with the arrival of the Portuguese invaders to its shores in 1471. Despite the end of colonialism in its traditional form, Africa is still the scene of bloody conflicts aimed at controlling its wealth.
Did Alchemy Turn Dust into Gold?
Thus, gold prompted people to migrate from one continent to another, and sparked wars and horrors, but there were those who aspired to turn dust into gold while sitting behind their quiet walls. Although their impossible ambitions were not achieved, they left us a legacy that represents the founding blocks of modern chemistry.
The roots of the preoccupation with turning metals into gold, or what is known as "alchemy", go back to the Pharaohs, but none of their texts have reached us, as Emperor Diocletian burned them, fearing that they would be used to finance rebellions against him. The oldest alchemical texts that have come down to us date back to only about 300 years BC, during the Greek rule of Egypt. Their influence remained limited until the Islamic conquest reached Egypt, and the movement to translate sciences into Arabic began, which heralded a new era for alchemy, in which it was transformed into an experimental science that could be measured by a group of Muslim scholars, most notably Jabir ibn Hayyan. In his book "The Story of Civilization", Will Durant believes that Muslims invented chemistry, as Greek texts remained vague hypotheses, while Muslims relied on observation and experimentation.
Muslim alchemists may not have been able to make gold, but through their experiments they were able to invent a number of chemical processes, most notably distillation, filtration and purification, the manufacture of compounds such as nitric and hydrochloric acids, the discovery of arsenic, and the classification of sulfur and mercury as chemical elements.
As we are accustomed to, gold combines opposing values: the insatiable greed to transform dirt into wealth, and the desire to connect with the spiritual and faith side. Thus, alchemy had two levels in its discourse, one related to the transformation of base metals into gold and the other related to the advancement of the human soul. This is what the Moroccan researcher Mohamed Al-Boughali explains in a study entitled “Alchemy: Its Philosophical Roots and Sufi Interpretations,” which indicated that many alchemical texts cannot be separated from being Sufi explanations, in which the transformations of metals appear as a metaphor for human advancement. If fire purifies metals from their impurities, then the human soul advances and is purified through worship and the works of the Sharia.
Gold between Psychology, Medicine and Technology
From this metaphorical discourse, the influence of alchemy extended to another field that may seem distant at first glance, which is psychology. Unlike Freud, psychologist Carl Jung believed that spiritual experience is the basic essence of human existence, which prompted him to explore cultures far from the dominant European culture, to find in alchemy what he was looking for, as a precise pictorial method that represents the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious. The result of this stage was his book "Psychology and Alchemy" published in 1944. In it, he analyzed the symbols of alchemy and linked them to the stages of personality transformation; he saw that alchemical transformations are suitable as a metaphor for the stages of transformation of consciousness and the unconscious and their integration (31). According to Jung, a person needs 4 elements symbolized by the four alchemical elements, which are intuition "fire", thought "air", feeling "water", and sensation "earth".
If the elixir of immortality is just a metaphor for psychological growth for Jung, it goes beyond this scope in the medical uses of gold, which has begun to play a promising role in the treatment and diagnosis of cancer, as illustrated by a recent study published during the previous year 2023 in "molecular-cancer", which praised the pioneering role of gold nanoparticles in bioengineered cancer "therapy" due to the properties with which they interact with light and heat.
Gold has also become a major nerve in many technology industries, as unlike other highly conductive metals, it does not corrode, and is easily formed into extremely precise wires and chips; making it an ideal component in the manufacture of mobile phones, cars, computers, and photovoltaic cells. In the field of space science, it is used to cover astronauts' suits to protect them from harmful infrared rays. This is the same technology used in the design of the James Webb Telescope, which is equipped with 18 hexagonal mirrors covered with a layer of gold 100 nanometers thick.
Although modern science has overcome the illusions of alchemy, the desire to manufacture gold has not diminished, albeit with different mechanisms. In 1941, scientists were able to produce radioactive isotopes of gold by neutron bombardment of mercury. The Soviets also turned lead shielding in a nuclear reactor into gold (by mistake) in 1972. In 1980, a research group at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, led by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Glenn Seaborg, was able to convert bismuth into the only stable isotope of gold, through nuclear collision. These successes may seem exciting to get-rich-quick fantasies, but none of them found sufficient resonance because they were expensive compared to the small amounts of gold they produced, and most of the gold they produced was radioactive, making it unusable and subject to radioactive decay within days.
Gold is money and returns to it
Despite all its complex roles in the medical and technology industries, gold still maintains its basic role as a means of preserving the value of money, whether in the form of an earring in the ear of a peasant woman in a village, or a small ingot bought by a Chinese student to save his savings, or countless huge ingots in the treasury of a country seeking to control its economic stability.
By the end of 2023, total demand for gold reached 4,899 tons, the highest ever, according to a report by the World Gold Council issued at the beginning of this year. Its prices jumped to unprecedented levels, and China, the largest consumer of gold, is considered to be at the forefront of the reasons for this jump. Demand for jewelry in China increased by 10% and gold bars and coins by 28%, reflecting the crisis in the real estate sector, the stock market, and the weakness of the currency, all of which prompted individuals to resort to gold as a safe haven.
But the matter was not limited to the behavior of individuals and investors only, as the Chinese government sought to increase its gold reserves in a buying wave that lasted more than 17 months, in an effort to get rid of the dominance of the US dollar and avoid any future sanctions from the United States, as gold remains a key player in the wealth game, although it is no longer a standard for currency, a role it previously played in what was known as the "gold standard system."
The "gold standard" was based on an agreement that obliges countries to match the supply of national currency with a gold reserve that determines the amount of cash in circulation. England was the first to adopt the "gold standard" in 1821, followed by most major countries, and confidence between different currencies stabilized; which encouraged international trade and led to a state of economic balance, but stability did not last long, as countries linked to the gold standard suffered from the accumulation of debts and the consumption of their financial resources, and the need for a more flexible system emerged after World War I, so England suspended the gold standard in 1931.
In 1934, the United States of America revalued gold from $20.67 to $35 in order to improve its economy, and the process of replacing the US dollar with gold accelerated, which flowed into the state's treasuries. In 1944, as a result of the inability of most major countries to cover their currencies with gold, the Bretton Woods Agreement was established to evaluate the currencies of member countries of the International Monetary Fund in the US dollar to become the dominant currency in global reserves, with its value set at $35 per ounce of gold.
The Vietnam War and subsequent events depleted the US gold reserves, prompting US President Richard Nixon to unilaterally end the Bretton Woods Agreement. Thus, the sacred bond between gold and currency was severed, and the value of currencies became linked to people’s trust in governments; which led to greater flexibility in managing the economy, controlling the money supply, setting interest rates, and other economic policies (53).
Although it is no longer a standard for currency, gold remains an indicator of the strength of the economy, and a basic asset for central banks and countries. As the writer George Bernard Shaw said, “If one has to choose between trusting the stability of natural gold and trusting the honesty and intelligence of government members - with all due respect to them - as long as the capitalist system exists, I advise voting for gold.”
Thus, over a long journey, gold moved from the peace of temples to the brilliance of money, changing history and pushing the areas of geographical maps to wider ranges, and playing various roles in various aspects of medicine, science, and the arts, and the bright yellow is still able to withstand the test of time. Why not, as it is a metal that does not wear out? I can imagine the golden ring wrapped around my finger, part of a golden lantern in the palace of an Abbasid caliph, or a dirham passing through the palms of Roman merchants, or even tiny atoms floating in space under the sun’s rays.
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Camelia Hussein