The Thirst for Gold — The Metal of Gods and Kings

There was something that had slept beneath the earth for thousands of years. Iron rusts red, silver darkens, wood rots and returns to the soil. But this one thing was different. The very moment it was dug up, it shone with a soft yellow light, as though it had been polished only yesterday. Gold. The first metal to capture the human heart, and one that captures it still. Its story began on the banks of the Nile, in the name of gods and kings. Why did people become so possessed by a metal that can neither be eaten nor lived in? The first clue lies in gold’s own quality of never changing.

The Miracle of a Metal That Does Not Rust

If one had to name a single reason gold drew people to it, it would be that it does not change. Most metals alter their appearance when they touch air or water. Iron is covered in reddish-brown rust, copper blooms with green patina, and even silver clouds over at the surface. Gold, however, scarcely changes under ordinary conditions. Whether it lies in the ground for thousands of years or sinks to the bottom of the sea, when it is taken up again by human hands, its shine is undimmed.

Today this property can be explained through chemistry. Gold reacts only with great reluctance to other substances and yields easily to neither oxygen nor water. But to the eyes of ancient people, who knew nothing of such reasoning, it must have looked like a miracle. Living things grow old, stone crumbles, wood decays. In a world where everything passes away, gold alone seemed to slip free from the hand of time. That very wonder is thought to be the source of the first thirst.

Gold also possessed a special feel that drew in those who handled it. Soft, it could be hammered into thin sheets or drawn out like a fine thread. Beaten, it spread; melted, it took any form one wished. Rare yet easy to work, this metal changed shape in human hands and was polished into a radiance fit to adorn gods and kings. An unchanging shine and a freely worked form. When these two came together, gold began to take on a special meaning that went beyond a mere unusual mineral.

There is one more thing we must not forget: that gold could originally be obtained only in tiny amounts. The gold scattered thinly through earth and sand had to be patiently washed apart and scooped up. Because it could not be had in great quantity like iron or copper, gold never became something everyone could possess. Its scarcity, joined to its eternal shine, raised gold’s value still higher. Everyone wanted it, yet there was never enough to go around. This delicate balance pushed gold up to the place of ‘something special.’

The Flesh of the Gods, a Fragment of the Sun

For the people of ancient Egypt, gold was not merely beautiful. They often said, it is told, that the flesh of the gods was made of gold. The sun, which kept rising from the east without ever sinking away for good, stood at the center of Egyptian faith. The radiance of the sun god Ra and the never-clouding light of gold came to be layered over one another in people’s hearts. Gold was treated like a fragment of the sun come down to earth.

For this reason, gold was mainly for temples and for kings. Ritual implements offered to the gods, thin gold leaf covering divine statues, and ornaments adorning the body of the king. To be clad in gold was a sign that its wearer stood near the world of the gods. Wealth itself, and at the same time a bridge to the sacred — from the very earliest times gold carried these two meanings at once.

And this faith showed itself most vividly in matters surrounding death. The Egyptians believed, it is said, that death was not an end but a doorway to another life. Gold, eternally unchanging, was the metal fit for an eternally continuing afterlife. To adorn a king’s remains with gold was a prayer that his soul might set out toward the gods without decaying. To entrust an unchanging life to an unchanging metal. Beneath the thirst for gold lay this earnest longing for death and eternity.

The Gold a Boy King Left Behind

There is an object that speaks of that prayer most eloquently: the golden mask of Tutankhamun. Tutankhamun was a king of Egypt’s 18th Dynasty in the New Kingdom, said to have reigned in the 14th century BCE. A boy king who took the throne around the age of ten and is said to have died before reaching twenty. He was not a hero who greatly moved the course of history. Even so, his name is known to the world because of the gold his tomb left behind.

In 1922, the British archaeologist Howard Carter discovered this king’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings. While many royal tombs had suffered the ravages of grave robbers in earlier ages, Tutankhamun’s tomb remained in a state close to untouched. From within, an overwhelming number of burial goods emerged one after another. What astonished people most was the golden mask that had covered the face of the king’s mummy. Said to weigh about eleven kilograms, set with colored stones such as lapis lazuli and carnelian upon high-purity gold, it held a breathtaking beauty.

This mask seizes the heart of the viewer not simply because so much gold was used. It is because, after more than three thousand years, that gold has not clouded by a single fleck and still keeps the shine it had when it was made. The boy king’s body eventually decayed. The kingdom that supported him and the gods he believed in are gone now. Yet the gold that covered his face alone keeps shining with an unchanging light. The wish of the Egyptians who entrusted eternity to gold was fulfilled, ironically, not in the king himself but on the side of the metal.

Thus gold became, in ancient Egypt, a special metal that bound together gods, kings, and eternity. But the story of gold does not end here. The gold that gave off its sacred light within temples and tombs would soon take on another role. Passed from hand to hand and from country to country, it would become the bearer of value itself — that is, ‘money.’ When the metal of the gods became a currency circling the world, humanity’s thirst for gold stepped into a new stage, different again from faith.