Table of Contents
Copper is the first metal people learned to shape, so it should mark the start of the story. On this site it marks a gap instead. Europe has a rich Bronze Age but almost no Copper Age before it, and the place where a long Copper Age can be seen is on the other side of the Atlantic, around Lake Superior. That gap is one of the most concrete arguments in the Atlantis literature, and it is why I keep coming back to this metal.
Europe’s missing Copper Age
Ignatius Donnelly put the problem plainly in 1882. On The Bronze Age in Europe:
Where on the face of the earth are we to find a Copper Age? Is it in the barbaric depths of that Asia out of whose uncivilized tribes all civilization is said to have issued? By no means. Again we are compelled to turn to the West.
Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882)
On the same page he quotes Sir W. R. Wilde: “It is remarkable that so few antique copper implements have been found (in Europe), although a knowledge of that metal must have been the preliminary stage in the manufacture of bronze.” My summary of the argument is on Three Ages of European Development: bronze seems to arrive in Europe already finished, and someone must have brought it.
Lewis Spence pushed the same point into chronology. On The Occult Sciences in Atlantis:
That catastrophe took place somewhere about the year 9600 B.C., yet copper was not worked anywhere in the non-Atlantean world until the Middle Predynastic period in Egypt, that is about 3700 B.C., while gold was worked there only shortly before that period.
Lewis Spence, The Occult Sciences in Atlantis, p. 78
The mines of Lake Superior
Donnelly then asks whether the copper of Europe came from America. Also on The Bronze Age in Europe:
The mining operations of some ancient people were there carried on upon a gigantic scale, not only along the shores of the lake but even far out upon its islands. At Isle Royale vast works were found, reaching to a depth of (18.3 meters)
Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882)
On Ancient Mines I list the prehistoric pollution that shows large-scale copper mining near Lake Superior, next to the Great Orme mines in Wales and the malachite of Sinai and Timna. Mound Builders in America connects the same northern mines to the people of the Mississippi plains, and in a 1900 history read on Mound builders in a 1900 history the narrator says:
they knew how to extract from the mines near Lake Superior
Kurimeo Ahau, America before Columbus and the mounds, at 42:33
Copper across the sea
If the copper traveled, there must be ships. On Minoan Civilization: Colony of Atlantis, Gavin Menzies, in his 2011 book The Lost Empire of Atlantis, writes of ingots of nearly pure copper found in a sunken Minoan ship near Thera. In his view, copper of that quality is found only near Lake Superior in North America, so the Minoan fleet must have reached across the Atlantic. In the east the trade was just as old: on Tamralipta and a claim of a British cover-up Harry Sahota describes the port of Bengal:
His ships carried copper, cotton, silk indigo across the world.
Harry Sahota, The port of Tamralipta, at 4:04
Orichalcum and the walls of Uruk
Plato’s Atlantis had a metal second only to gold, orichalcum, which Spence glosses as mountain copper. On Orichalcum I follow it to the copper-zinc ingots found off Sicily in 2015. Copper also shines in the oldest epic. On Epic of Gilgamesh: Tablet I the reader is told to look at the wall of Uruk “which gleams like copper(?)” and to “Find the copper tablet box” that holds the story. The Le Grand Voyage account goes further and gives the Atlanteans a lost art of tempering copper to a steel-like edge.
The copper-colored race
Oahspe uses copper as a color, not a metal, for one of its key peoples. On The I’huan, I’hins, Druks, and Yaks:
And there began to be a new tribe on the earth; and they were called I'huans, because they were half-breeds, between the druks and I'hins. The I'huans were red like copper; and they were taller and stronger than any other people in all the world.
Oahspe, First Book of the First Lords, Chapter III, verse 24
The same page quotes the Book of the Arc of Bon on Moses as “a pure I’huan, copper-colored and of great strength.” Whether metal or skin, copper in these sources points to the same thing: something older than the history books admit.
Related pages
- The Bronze Age in Europe
- Three Ages of European Development
- Ancient Mines
- Mound Builders in America
- Mines in the Bible
- Orichalcum
- Minoan Civilization: Colony of Atlantis
- The I’huan, I’hins, Druks, and Yaks
For every page I tagged with copper, see the copper tag archive.
