126 HUMAN HISTOEY 



Whether there was more than one place of origin of the use of 

 any metal in the Old World is not known. Copper was inde- 

 pendently taken into use in the New World, and the use of copper 

 may have originated independently in North and South America.^ 

 Bronze was known in Peru. Heat was certainly employed for 

 hammering and annealing copper, and casting may have been 

 employed. Iron was sometimes used in North America to make 

 ornaments. With regard to the Old World a claim is made for many 

 countries as the original home of metal working. Eeisner found 

 copper daggers, spear heads, harpoons, pins, needles, and bracelets 

 in the graves of the middle pre-Dynastic period of Egypt ; by the 

 time of the first dynasty the Egyptians were ' in possession of a full 

 equipment of copper weapons '.^ In the early pre-Dynastic period 

 metallic pigments containing copper were in use, and it is possi- 

 ble that the reduction of copper may have been first suggested 

 by some accidental fusion of these substances. It is further 

 claimed that there is evidence of the local evolution of copper 

 implements since the earliest forms imitate stone implements, 

 and the later forms are merely improvements of pre-existing 

 types.^ Eeisner concludes that there is no reason to assume that 

 the invention came from beyond the frontiers of Egypt.'* The 

 Sumerians, on the other hand, when we first meet them at 

 a very early date, must have been using copper for some con- 

 siderable time. All that can be said with certainty is that the 

 use of metals originated in the Orient, probably before 4000 b. c. 

 — possibly some two or three thousand years earher. Copper, it 

 may be noticed, occurs in Armenia, in the upper basin of the 

 Tigris and in Sinai amongst other places. The use of bronze 

 gradually spread over Europe. It is found in Crete about 3000 b. c, 

 in Southern Thessaly about 2500 b. c, and seems to have reached 

 England about 2000 b. c. or somewhat later. Generally speaking, 

 we can connect the taking into use of metals with the rise of 

 the first civilizations. These civilizations reached their greatest 

 development before the introduction of iron. The whole Minoan 

 civilization, the Mycenean survival of Minoan civilization on the 

 mainland,^ the most glorious period of Egyptian history up to 



' Handbook of American Indians : articles on Copper and Iron. - Reisner, 



' Early Dynastic Cemeteries of Naga-ed-Der ', University of California Publications, 

 1908, p. 117. ^ Reisner, loc. cit., p. 127. * Ibid., p. 134. ^ Iron 



weapons are found in late Mycenean graves (Ridgeway, Early Age of Greece, 

 p. 294). 



