Mines of Laurion

The Athenians used large numbers of slaves to mine the area, with the silver produced contributing significantly to the city's wealth.

[7] Shafts were driven down into the ground and galleries opened where slaves, chained, naked, and branded, worked the seams illuminated only by guttering oil lamps.

This discovery meant that at the beginning of the second Persian invasion of Greece (480–479 BC), the Athenian state had at its disposal a hundred talents of silver (about 2.6 tonnes) from the aforementioned vein.

[8] Rather than distribute this wealth amongst the citizens of Athens, Themistocles proposed that this money should be used to construct 200 triremes, which were used to conduct the naval campaign against Persia which culminated in victory at the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC.

[6] Over the next century lead from the mines would be brought to make countless different water pipes and clamps that would aid in the rebuilding of Athens.

[11] Sulla's campaign against Athens in the First Mithridatic War (89–85 BC), put an end to the mining although there appear to have been limited attempts to reactivate them a few centuries later.

After the dispute was resolved, an economic scandal broke out, as a result of the cultivation of rumors regarding the existence of gold reserves in the mines.

Atop the folded marbles lie a layer of limestone deposited during a marine transgressive episode in the Jurassic and lower Cretaceous.

[18] For almost 300 years the mines of Laurion provided ancient Athens and their allies with several thousand tons of high purity silver.

[21] The water from this cistern was typically fed into a few different nozzles that lead to the sluices, which were wooden troughs meant to filter out large ore pieces that might still need to be ground into smaller sizes.

[21] At Thorikos the cisterns were fed by the collecting of runoff from the scarce rainfall which failed to provide a sufficient amount of long lasting water.

[21] As a result of this poor water supply the study had to conclude that Thorikos was a widely less productive site when compared to the Soureza washeries.

[21] The mines of Laurion were an important source of metal during Ancient Greece and helped to fabricate many of the coins that were exchanged as money throughout the region.

[19] Within the mines, located on the southeast portion of Attica, there are large silver deposits that also contain an abundance of copper and lead.

[19] The metal ore of the mines contain a specific isotopic ratio of lead within the silver, that is later turned into coins by the Greeks.

[24] Other mines in the Mediterranean, such as those on the islands of Siphnos and Thasos mentioned by Herodotus, have similar lead ratios but differ enough for archaeologists and physicists to pinpoint where the silver originates.

The level of mineral purity within the extracted ore was incredibly rare throughout the ancient Greek world and Athens had exclusive access to it.

[6] Athens would then use their access to the Laurion mines to direct a majority of the silver to be made into coins that would be used to pay for the famous Athenian navy.

[6] Since the flow of silver from the mines waned, the Athenians began to re-mint their coins en masse in order to keep the economic growth they were receiving alive.

The Athenian leader Hippias had tried this practice a century before by imposing very specific coinage policies that Oeconomica wrote about:he also made the coinage existing among the Athenians legally invalid (adokimon), and, having fixed a price, ordered them to bring it to him; and after they had come together for the purpose of striking another type (character), he gave back the same silver money (argurion).

[25] After the Peloponnesian War had ended and the mines had run dry, this devaluation and re-minting of Athenian coins was brought to an extreme all over Attica.

The Romans provided cheap slave labor and new technologies gave the Greeks new means of extracting silver in more efficient ways.