Gold and silver around the world

Where it all began

The story starts earlier than most people guess. In 1972, a construction worker in Varna, Bulgaria, dug up a prehistoric cemetery. Archaeologists went on to recover about 5 kg (11 lb) of gold from its graves: bracelets, pendants, earrings, beads and more, all about 6,500 years old. It's some of the oldest worked gold ever found.

Silver took a little more effort. It's rarely found pure, so people had to learn to separate it from lead ore. By around 3000 BCE, metalworkers in Anatolia and Mesopotamia were doing exactly that.

Egypt: gold of the gods

Ancient Egyptians believed the bodies of their gods were made of gold and lapis lazuli, so gold was everywhere in their temples and tombs. Most of it came from the Eastern Desert and from Nubia, to the south.

The most famous Egyptian gold of all is Tutankhamun's funeral mask, found in 1925. It holds about 10 kg (roughly 22 lb) of gold. That's about the weight of 320 one-ounce gold coins.

The first coins

For thousands of years, people weighed gold and silver to trade them. Then, in the kingdom of Lydia (in today's western Türkiye), someone had a better idea. Around 600 BCE or a little earlier, Lydians began stamping small lumps of electrum, a natural mix of gold and silver, at set weights. Many carried a lion's head. Those were the world's first coins.

A generation or two later, under King Croesus (who reigned about 560 to 546 BCE), Lydian metalworkers learned to separate electrum into pure gold and pure silver. The result was the first pure gold coin. Croesus became so famous for his wealth that people still say "rich as Croesus" today.

Athens and Rome

Silver built an empire in Greece. The mines at Laurion, near Athens, may have been worked as early as 1000 BCE. In 483 BCE, Athens used silver from those mines to build a fleet, and that fleet beat the Persians at Salamis in 480 BCE. The city's silver "owl" coins, first struck around 510 BCE, kept the same design for centuries.

Rome ran on two coins: the silver denarius, introduced around 211 BCE, and the gold aureus, worth 25 denarii. When crises hit, Rome put less and less silver in its coins. By the late 200s CE, Rome's "silver" coins were mostly copper with a thin silver wash. In 312 CE, Constantine replaced the aureus with a new gold coin, the solidus.

Silver goes global

In 1545, the Spanish found a mountain of silver at Potosí, in today's Bolivia. In the 1500s, it was considered the largest industrial complex in the world. Mines at Zacatecas, in Mexico, opened in the same decade. By 1600, Spanish America was producing about ten times as much silver as all of Europe.

Much of that silver sailed west. From 1565 to 1815, Spanish galleons crossed the Pacific between Acapulco and Manila once a year, carrying Mexican silver out and Chinese silk and porcelain back. China had moved its taxes to silver by 1581, so demand there seemed endless.

The coin that carried it all was the Spanish 8-real piece, better known as the "piece of eight" or Spanish dollar. It became the most widely accepted trade coin in the world. It was legal tender in Canada until 1860 and in the United States until 1857, and it still circulated in parts of China until the 1930s.

The age of gold rushes

The 1800s brought the gold rushes, and they changed whole countries:

• California, 1848. James Marshall found gold at Sutter's Mill on January 24, 1848. California's non-Indigenous population went from about 14,000 to more than 200,000 in four years.
• Australia, 1851. Finds in New South Wales and then Victoria set off a stampede. In the 1850s, Victoria produced more than a third of the world's gold.
• South Africa, 1886. The Witwatersrand gold reefs were discovered.

Canada's gold and silver story

Canada's first recorded gold discovery was in 1823, on the Rivière Chaudière in Quebec. The big rushes came later, and they helped shape the country.

Fraser River and Cariboo, British Columbia

About 30,000 gold seekers poured into the Fraser River valley in 1858. Partly to keep the region from being taken over by the United States, Britain created the colony of British Columbia that same year, on August 2, 1858. The Cariboo rush followed from 1861 to 1867, along with a 650 km wagon road from Yale to Barkerville.

The Klondike, Yukon

In mid-August 1896, George Carmack, Keish (Skookum Jim Mason) and Káa Goox (Dawson Charlie) found gold on Rabbit Creek, soon renamed Bonanza Creek. When the news reached the outside world in July 1897, about 100,000 people set out for the Yukon. Only a fraction made it: by midsummer 1898, around 18,000 people were in Dawson City. Most went home broke. The rush still produced nearly $29 million in gold.

Northern Ontario

Ontario's turn came with the railway. On August 7, 1903, two men cutting timber for the new Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway found silver near Long Lake. That find became the town of Cobalt. By 1910, Cobalt ranked fourth in the world for silver, and its mines produced over 420 million ounces in their first 60 years. It's still called the cradle of Canadian mining.

Gold followed. The Porcupine rush near today's Timmins began in 1909, and its "Big Three" mines (Dome, Hollinger and McIntyre) made it North America's top gold-producing area for years. Kirkland Lake's first strike came in 1911. Canada's gold output peaked at 166 tonnes in 1941.

Canada's own coins

The Ottawa branch of Britain's Royal Mint opened on January 2, 1908. Its first coin was a silver 50-cent piece. It came under Canadian control in 1931 and is now the Royal Canadian Mint.

• 1979: the Gold Maple Leaf is launched. From 1982 it was the first bullion coin made in 99.99% pure gold.
• 1988: the Silver Maple Leaf arrives, in 99.99% pure silver.
• 2007: the Mint unveils a 100 kg gold coin, 53 cm across and 99.999% pure, with a face value of $1 million. One was stolen from a Berlin museum in 2017.

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