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Updated: May 21, 2025
He reaches the ruins after ten miles from the fort, when they lie between twelve and thirteen from El-Wijh. He calls the porphyritic trap "dark granite." He descends the "caves" with ropes and lights; yet he does not perceive that they are mining shafts and tunnels, puits d'air, adits for the workmen, and pits by which the ore was "brought to grass." And the Hydrographic Chart is as bad.
Along the sides of the valley are the tombs of the kings neatly numbered, as it might be mining adits with concrete steps leading up to them, and iron grilles that lock of nights, and doorkeepers of the Department of Antiquities demanding the proper tickets.
Surface gathering of metals, anterior to mining Earliest known mining operations Earliest Phoenician mining in Phoenicia Proper Mines of Cyprus Phoenician mining in Thasos and Thrace in Sardinia in Spain Extent of the metallic treasures there Phoenician methods not unlike those of the present day Use of shafts, adits, and galleries Roof of mines propped or arched Ores crushed, pounded, and washed Use of quicksilver unknown Mines worked by slave labour.
From Thasos in the East, where Herodotus saw "a large mountain turned topsy-turvy by the Phoenicians in their search for gold," to the Scilly Islands in the West, where workings attributable to them are still to be seen, all the metalliferous islands and coast tracts bear traces of Phoenician industry in tunnels, adits, and air-shafts, while manufactured vessels of various kinds in silver, bronze, and terra-cotta, together with figures and gems of a Phoenician type, attest still more widely their manufacturing and commercial activity.
Where the metal lay deeper, perpendicular shafts were sunk into the ground to a greater or less depth sometimes, if we may believe Diodorus, to the depth of half a mile or more; from these shafts horizontal adits were carried out at various levels, and from the adits there branched lateral galleries, sometimes at right angles, sometimes obliquely, which pursued either a straight or a tortuous course.
The gold trail is usually long and arduous; but the prospector is content to have it so, for once it is made easier the poor man's day has gone. Then the men of the cities set up their hydraulic monitors, or drive their adits, and the free-lance who disdains to work for them rolls up his old blankets and pushes out once again into the waste.
As the danger of a fall of material from the roofs of the adits and galleries was well understood, it was customary to support them by means of wooden posts, or, where the material was sufficiently firm, to arch them. Still, from time to time, falls would occur, with great injury and loss of life to the miners.
In one of these adits a gallery called Cruzada, at an elevation of 1,460 mètres he found an increase of 1° C. of mean temperature for every 33 mètres of horizontal penetration, or, approximately, 1° F. for 60 feet.
What all these passages are, of course I cannot say, but we thought that they must be the ancient workings of a mine, of which the various shafts and adits travelled hither and thither as the ore led them. This is the only way in which we could account for such a multitude of galleries.
We cannot say what its influence would have been upon that force of inspiration that urged him on; whether it would have daunted him, and prevented him from driving his adits into places where no theory pointed to a lode. If so, then we may rejoice that this strong delver at the mine of natural knowledge was left free to wield his mattock in his own way.
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