Part of The Gold Story, our cited history of gold.
The metal of the gods
For the ancient Egyptians, gold was divine. Its untarnishable brilliance made it, in their eyes, the flesh of the sun-god Ra and the skin of the gods. When Howard Carter opened Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, the king lay beneath a solid gold mask of some ten kilograms, inside a coffin of solid gold.
Where it came from
Egypt’s gold was won from the Eastern Desert and Nubia to the south. Geologists Klemm, Klemm and Murr documented around 250 ancient production sites worked across roughly six thousand years (Journal of African Earth Sciences, 2001).
The number that punctures the legend
The Klemm estimate for total ancient Egyptian and Nubian gold is about 18 tonnes, roughly 7 of it Pharaonic (Klemm et al., 2001) — less than a modern mine produces in a month. It is contested: a 2025 study argues output was higher. But even the largest estimate is small beside one central-bank vault today. Gold’s hold on the imagination has always exceeded its supply. That is the point of it.
What survived
Empires fell, names were chiselled away, bronze corroded. The gold did not. Tutankhamun’s mask emerged from three thousand years of darkness as bright as the day it was cast. Gold is the only medium mankind has found that does not decay. Everything else we have used to store value has, in the end, rotted, rusted, or been printed away.