Footnote 316: Schrader and Jevons, _Antiquities of the Aryans_, p. 155; Much, _Die Kupferzeit in Europa_, p. 147. The Epic affluence in gold was not wholly fictitious. From the sepulchres of Mycenæ alone about one hundred pounds Troy weight of the metal have been disinterred; freely at command even in the lowest stratum of the successive habitations at Hissarlik, it was lavishly stored, and highly wrought in the picturesquely-named ‘treasure of Priam;’ and has been found, in plates and pearls, beneath twenty metres of volcanic debris, in the Cycladic islands Thera and Therapia.[317] This plentifulness contrasts strangely with the extreme scarcity of gold in historic Greece. It persisted, however, mainly owing to the vicinity of the auriferous Ural Mountains, in the Milesian colony of Panticapæum, near Kertch, where graves have been opened containing corpses shining ‘like images’ in a complete clothing of gold-leaf, and equipped with ample supplies of golden vessels and ornaments. Footnote 317: Much, _Die Kupferzeit_, p. 41. Silver[318] was, at the outset, a still rarer substance than gold. Not that there is really less of it. The ocean alone is estimated to contain nearly ten thousand million tons, and the mines yielding it, though few, are rich. But it occurs less obviously, and is less easy to obtain pure. Accordingly, in some very early Egyptian inscriptions, silver, by heading the list of metals, claims a supremacy over them which proved short-lived. It terminated for ever with the scarcity that had produced it, when the Phœnicians began to pour the flood of Spanish silver into the markets and treasure-chambers of the East. Armenia constituted another tolerably copious source of supply; and it was in this quarter that Homer located the ‘birthplace of silver.’[319] Alybé, on the coast of the Euxine east of Paphlagonia, whence the Halizonians came to Troy, was identified by Strabo with Chalybe, a famous mining district.[320] The people there, indeed, as Xenophon recorded, lived mostly by digging iron; and their name was preserved in the Greek _chalups_, steel, and survives with ourselves in _chalybeate_ waters. The district has, however, in modern times, again become known as argentiferous. The Homeric tradition receives countenance from the discovery, in the neighbourhood of Tripoli, of antique, half obliterated silver-workings; and from the existence, not far off, of a ‘Silver-town’ (Gunnish-kana), and a ‘Silver-mountain’ (Gunnish-dagh), whence a large tribute in silver still flowed, a few years ago, into the leaky coffers of Turkey.[321] Footnote 318: Blümner, _Technologie der Gewerbe_, Bd. iv. pp. 28-32. Footnote 319: _Iliad_, ii. 857. Footnote 320: _Geog._ xii. 3. Footnote 321: Rougemont, _L’Âge de Bronze_, p. 169; Riedenauer, _Handwerk und Handwerker_, p. 101.