What Is Gold?

Introduction

What is Gold? How does natural gold occur? And why have humans been digging it out of the ground for thousands of years? This article will briefly cover how natural gold and gold’s properties. It will also briefly cover the history of silver and the history of gold bullion.

Natural Gold

Gold is a naturally forming soft yellow metal. Also known by the acronym Au on the periodic table. The gold melting point starts at 1064°C (1947 °F). Gold has some very impressive properties. As a metal, it is able to be flattened out to such great lengths, making it one of the most malleable metals. Gold is so soft it can be shaped by your bare hands. It is also chemically inert, so it doesn’t interact with anything and won’t rust.

In ancient times it was easier to mine gold because of the abundance of larger pieces. Over the centuries, mining gold has become harder as the global supply has been depleted. Requiring greater technology to extract the gold that our ancient contemporaries were incapable of.

Unfortunately, unlike today, Roman and other ancient mining techniques were extremely damaging to their environment. Modern techniques use new methods and technology to avoid the level of damage our ancient ancestors inflicted on the land.

history of natural gold
Pure gold that was unearthed at a mine and then placed on black sand.
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History Of Gold

Gold has been used as a currency or for barter by human beings since the beginning of human civilization. In ancient Egypt, people used natural gold nuggets in trade. The Egyptians also developed a technique for gold beating, which allowed them to guild gold onto various items. While this skill was later perfected in medieval Europe, it was still the same basic technique that the Egyptians would use.

The history of gold has long shown that it is valued, whether it was because of connections to the various ancient religions or showing one’s wealth in an attempt to impose power.

It is said that in ancient Rome, one troy ounce of gold could buy you a very nice outfit equivalent to today’s modern suits.

Today one troy ounce of gold is worth around 2500$ Canadian, making it possible to afford a very nice suit. This is just one example of gold’s ability to store someone’s economic energy.

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Gold Bullion

Bullion is perhaps the most likely way to see Fine gold. Fine gold is any coin, round, or bar that is 0.999%+ pure gold. At the same time, this number changes from country to country, but 0.999%+ is the global standard. Gold’s properties also allow it to remain shiny and beautiful with minimal worries.

The Canadian Gold Maple is one of the world’s most popular 1 Troy Ounce of 0.9999% gold coins available. It is available in fractional amounts of 1/2th, 1/4th, 1/10th, and 1/20th available in some years. At the same time, others dislike it because of the connection to the British Monarchy.

Gold is becoming popular again with old and new investors. The amount per ounce is intimidating for some, so they opt to buy silver, which is a good alternative. Many collectors like having a little bit of gold in their collection, making fractional bullion a great choice.

An example of the Canadian 1 Troy Ounce Gold Maple Leaf coin.
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Gold Coins

Gold coins are one of the most in-demand types of coins by collectors and investors. We carry a range of gold bullion and gold numismatic coins. Below is a link to all of the gold coins we currently have in stock.

NGC-certified gold Byzantine Solidus.

Published by Invest in History Co.

We specialize in high-quality gold and silver coins. Focusing on Middle East, Eastern European, and Ancient coins. We carry Roman, Greek, Parthian, Phoenician, Celtic, Byzantine, Russian, Jewish, Islamic, and many other culture's coins.

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