Note 5 — Chapter XII · How Copper-culture reached China

Copper was found in the wadis of Upper Egypt and on the Red Sea coast—in those very areas in which gold was worked for generations before copper was extracted from malachite. At a later period the Pharaohs sent gangs of miners to work the copper-mines in the Sinaitic peninsula. King Semerket, of the early Dynastic age, had men extracting copper in the Wadi Maghara. “His expedition was exposed to the depredations of the wild tribes of Beduin … and he recorded his punishment of them in a relief on the rocks of the Wadi.” There is evidence that at this remote period the Pharaohs “maintained foreign relations with far remote peoples”.5 A record of a later age (c. 2000 B.C.) affords us a vivid glimpse of life in the “Mine-Land”. An official recorded in an inscription that he had been sent there in what he calls the “Evil summer season”. He complained, “It is not the season for going to this Mine-Land.… The highlands are hot in summer, and the mountains brand the skin.” Yet he could boast that “he extracted more copper than he had been ordered to obtain”.6