Evidently then, both the Egyptians and the Chaldæans must have been well provided with bronze tools capable of hewing and polishing the hardest rocks. Now bronze is an alloy of copper and tin. Copper is a common metal, easily reduced from its ores, and not infrequently occurring in a metallic state, as in the mines of Lake Superior, where the North American Indians hammered out blocks of it from the native metal. And we have proofs that the ancient Egyptians obtained copper at a very early date from the mines of Wady Magerah in the peninsula of Sinai, and probably also from Cyprus. But where did they get their tin, without which there is no bronze? Tin is a metal which is only found in a few localities, and in the form of a black oxide which requires a considerable knowledge of metallurgy to detect and to reduce. The only considerable sources of tin now known are those of Cornwall, Malacca, Banca, and Australia. Of these, the last was of course unknown to the ancient world, and it is hardly probable that its supplies were obtained from such remote sources as those of the extreme East. Not that it is at all impossible that it might have been brought from Malacca by prehistoric sea-routes to India, and thence to Egypt by the Red Sea and to Chaldæa by the Persian Gulf, and this is the conjecture of one of the latest authorities in a very interesting work just published on the _Dawn of Ancient Art_. But it seems highly improbable that, if such routes had been established, they should have been so completely abandoned as they certainly were when the supply of tin for the Eastern world was brought from the West. In fact, when we get the first authoritative information as to the commerce in tin, about 1000 B.C., we find that it was supplied mainly by Tyre, and came from the West beyond the Straits of Gibraltar; and in the Greek Periplus, written in the first century, it is distinctly stated that India was supplied with tin from Britain by way of Alexandria and the Red Sea, which is hardly consistent with the supposition that the tin of Malacca had been long known and worked.