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The Silver of Laurion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009
Extract
‘Few provincial industrial towns have anything much to recommend them, but Laurion has a sinister ugliness that is all its own.…’ so Osbert Lancaster; nevertheless the dusty little town has a certain extra interest for those who take the long road to Sunion and so pass through it. For it was there that the famous silver of Athens was mined. But for all that the area has been remarkably little examined. There has been much work devoted to the boundary stones and demes, but the mining itself has been largely ignored since the Compagnie Française des Mines du Laurion began to rework the old mines at the end of the last century. At that time (1896), E. Ardaillon published the only book on the mines that has as yet been written, and apart from a few all too cursory reports little has been done either to check his findings or to extend his work.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © The Classical Association 1967
References
page 145 note 1 Where I have been unable to check them I have accepted Ardaillon's figures since he had access to the records of the Mining Company. In this paper they are distinguished by the letters (EA).
page 146 note 1 I am no geologist, but a sample which was briefly examined though not analysed at the University Museum, Oxford, seems to bear this out. The sample was taken from modern workings and the ore had worked well into the calcite which had largely decomposed to form gypsum.
page 147 note 1 And here one must remember that the unusually large deposits of lead (which is the easiest metal to obtain from galena) from the Mycenean levels of the acropolis at Athens may indicate that mining at Laurion goes back to 1200 b.c. or possibly even earlier.
page 148 note 1 In some cases the sockets for the crane are still visible about the mouth of the shaft.
page 149 note 1 A corrupt passage in ‘Aristotle’, Athenaion Politeia(47.2) tells us that the leases were for 10 or 7 years (according to the reading).
page 150 note 1 It would be interesting to know how long it took to cut 4 in. and how many stages one was expected to cut in a shift. Pliny, (Nat. Hist. xxxiii. 70Google Scholar; also ibid. 97) tells us that the lamps decided the length of the shifts. Some uncontrolled experiments with various types of oil and wick were done and serve to indicate that an estimate of a six-hour shift may not be far wrong.
page 151 note 1 The waste slag heaps of the ancient mines were reworked by the modern miners. By 1890 slag heaps had been found amounting to an estimated 14,000,000 tons. No samples from these showed more than 12 per cent, of ore, and most were between 8 per cent, and 10 per cent. (EA).
page 151 note 2 One such mill is preserved in the museum at Laurion which is housed in the Public Library.
page 152 note 1 Occasionally as an added refinement the water was poured on to a sloping slab from which it trickled back into the tank without disturbing any sediment. The presence of such refinements is clear evidence of the delicacy of the operation, and of the skill involved.
page 153 note 1 All the examples of this type observed had the lower end of the stairway bridged with a masonry beam which can be taken as evidence for the existence of a roof.
page 153 note 2 This waterproof cement is so far as I know entirely confined to use in cisterns, and was not used for washing-tables and the like.