Pactolus River Gold-Washing Site

Fluvius Pactolus

MineAsia · Sart Cayi, Sart, Salihli, Manisa, TurkeyBuilt 700 BCE

About

A modest stream off Mount Tmolus that ancient writers credited with making Lydia's kings the richest men on earth. Herodotus wrote that its gold-bearing sands ran straight through the middle of the Sardis marketplace, and legend held King Midas washed away his golden touch in its waters. Excavators found 6th-century BCE workshops here for refining electrum into pure gold and silver. The dried placer deposits were long exhausted by 117 CE, but the river and its legend still ran through the city.

What happened here

Work goes on underground by lamplight in shifts, and the lamp is also the clock. Galleries follow the ore, propped with timber, drained by wooden screws and bucket wheels worked by hand in stages up the shaft. Ventilation is a second shaft and a fire to draw the air. The labour is convicts, slaves and paid men working side by side on different terms, and the paid men do the skilled cutting. Above ground the ore is crushed, washed in long channels, and smelted, and the smoke kills the vegetation for miles. Mines of any size are imperial property, leased to contractors under written regulations covering shifts, drainage, bath-house charges and who may open a new gallery. Settlements grow around them fast and empty just as fast.

In ancient writing

Herodotus, Histories 5.101
States that the river Pactolus, carrying gold dust from Mount Tmolus, flowed through the middle of the Sardis marketplace.