Tin, one of the least durable of metals, at the same time readily fused and one of the easiest to treat metallurgically, was called by the Greeks κασσίτερος, and by the Latins _cassiteron_,[257] whence probably the Arab. قصدير, and the Sanskrit कस्तीर. The Hebrew name is בדיל (Badíl = a substitute, a separation, an alloy). Hut (white metal) in Egyptian includes silver and tin: in Coptic it is Thram, Thran, or Basensh. Kalaí (Linschoten’s ‘Calaem’) is the popular term for tin in India: the word is Arabic rather than Turkish. Tenekeh (tin-plate) in Arabic is an evident congener of the Assyrian [Cuneiform] ‘Anaker,’ and it remarkably resembles the Scandinavian Din, German Zinn, and our Tin. As we find ‘Teyne’ in Chaucer and old writers, ‘tin’ may come from its easy ‘thinning’ or beating out. The later Latins changed the _plumbum album_ or white lead of Pliny (iv. 30) to _stannum_: whence our word derived through the neo-Latin. The origin of Kassiteron, Kasdír, Kastira, is disputed, and philologists remark that Cassi is a British (Keltic) prefix, as in Cassi-belanus. Tin was found in the Caucasus, in India, in Southern Persia (Drangæ Country); in Tuscany, in Iberia (Spain and Portugal),[258] in Sweden, Saxony, Bohemia, Hungary, and notably in England. There are still deposits near the modern Temeswar (Pannonia), and the granite hills of Gallicia and Zamora are not exhausted. It is now produced in Russia, Greenland, the Brazil, and the United States. Wilkinson would fetch the alloy of ancient Egypt from Spain, India, Malacca, or even from Banca,[259] between Sumatra and Borneo; the Banca tin-mines, long worked by the Chinese were first visited by the Portuguese in 1506. But compounds of tin and copper were common in Egypt at the time of the Sixth Dynasty (B.C. 3000). Tin is mentioned as early as B.C. 1452 in the Book of Numbers (xxxii. 22), with gold and silver, ‘brass’ (copper, especially pyrites), iron, and lead[260] (‘oferet’). In B.C. 760 the prophetic books, called from Isaiah (i. 25) and from Ezekiel (xxii. 18, 20), make tin an alloy of silver. The Egyptians would derive their metals in the first place from Upper Egypt; and their first Kheft or mines of gold (_khetem_) and copper lay in the Thebaid. Secondly, they would resort to the land of Midian on the eastern flank, and running south of the long narrow gulf, El-Akabah: this grand range of Ghats or Coast Mountains was in those days a noted mining centre, and it has still a great industrial future. Thirdly, by means of the Phœnicians, who apparently taught the Greeks metallurgy which they learned in Egypt, they would import their tin from Southern France, Spain, and England.[261] [Heading: _TIN._]