More Golden Facts for Fun

September 15, 2009 | Filed under: Miscellaneous,The List | Posted by: List Guy

Think you know everything about gold?

Here’s some more golden facts to widen your repertoire and make you a quiz team hero:

1. The word “money” and “mint” comes from the Roman Goddess, Moneta – when the Gauls attacked the Romans it was the geese who were kept as an early warning that alerted the defenders to the attack – as a result of saving all the gold, the Romans built a shrine to “Moneta” Goddess of Warnings and the link between treasure (money) and gold was established;

2. The San Francisco 49’ers are so named after the 1849 Gold Rush;

3. The Bible has more than 400 references to gold within it, far more than any other element or substance and also there are specific mandates to cover holy furniture with gold especially the tabernacle;

4. Gold is one of the oldest known metals to man having been discovered some 5,000 years ago along with copper;

5. If you think gold is a heavy way of carting your money around, give a thought for those in the days before gold coins were used – cattle, sheep and even slaves were used as forms of currency until gold took over;

6. Hyper-inflation and the ever increasing cost of gold was the main reason for the collapse of the Roman Empire – in AD 307 one pound of gold was worth 100,000 denarii but by the beginning of the end of the Empire, AD 350 it was 2,120,000,000 – the legionaries could not be paid and the barbarian hordes could not be bribed to stay away;

7. In the Medieval times, drinking molten gold with emeralds in it was considered a cure for the Black Death;

8. Alchemists have long sought a way to turn “base” metals into gold but only with modern nuclear science has this become possible except the cost of doing so vastly outweighs the value of the gold produced – nevertheless, it was the search for turning metals such as lead into gold which laid the foundations for numerous scientific discoveries and modern chemistry without which we would have very little of our society today;

9. The gold ducat was introduced in 1824 by the city-state of Venice – gold coins were the standard for the following 500 years and even today, gold plays a significant role in stabilizing economies and underpinning financial transactions on a global basis;

10. The Spanish Inquisition used gold as a form of execution – molten gold was poured down the throat of the victim and this ensured no blood was shed;

11. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is the largest repository of gold bullion in the world (not Fort Knox, Kentucky as many believe) – most of the gold stored in New York does not belong to the United States but to other countries around the world;

12. The “troy” as in troy ounce, comes from the French city of Troyes where the system of weights and measures was first developed to deal with gold;

13. The purity of gold is described in terms of “carats” – carat is itself derived from carob seeds which were first used as counter-measures on scales for measuring the weight of gold and subsequently diamonds.

By Eric, a writer for Refinity.com, where you can make money if you wish to sell gold or sell old coins.

Tips for Selling Your Old Gold Jewelry (lawrencereaves.com)
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The world’s most beautiful gold coin. (izitso.net)

Posted by List Guy on September 15, 2009. Filed under Miscellaneous, The List. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry