Anatolia has been the birthplace of silver in Turkey since the fourth millennium BC. It is the one who supplied the ancient civilizations that established around the Aegean Sea and the eastern Mediterranean with their needs of this mineral for more than two thousand years. And after the early production was limited to collecting pure or almost pure silver found in riverbeds the inhabitants of Chalcedon (in present-day Turkey) at the beginning of the third millennium BC developed methods of separating silver from lead in the ores in which these two metals are mixed. Opening the doors for extraction from the mines.
Around the year 1200 BC the Lorium mines near Athens became the first producer of silver and about four hundred years later trade in this metal spread between the Greek islands and North Africa especially Pharaonic Egypt in addition to the Phoenician coast which provided enough of it for use in industries and fields Other than jewelery decorative tools and medicine that is coinage from it and considering it a measure of the value of goods and services.
Greece remained the largest producer of silver for nearly a thousand years which ended in the fourth century BC but the Carthaginians compensated for the scarcity of Greek mines by investing in Spanish mines which led the production of silver for a thousand years until the Arab conquest of Andalusia.
From the middle age until the nineteenth century
The Arabs showed a passion for silver which led to an increase in their needs for this mineral for the manufacture of jewelry and ornamental tools so that the Spanish mines were no longer sufficient to meet the demand so excavations began in all parts of Europe and mines that became world famous later on were discovered in Germany Austria and separate regions of Eastern Europe.
It is not certain that production in the Middle Ages significantly exceeded the ceiling of one and a half million ounces per year that was previously produced by the Greek Lorium mines and although Spanish production prevailed throughout the first millennium AD it did not disturb the balance between supply and demand which remained in place due to scarcity. The mines of Greece the Aegean and Anatolia.
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