CAMPUS CURRENT
C OL L E G E NE WS
Copper and Mudd CYPRUS HAS A MOST UNUSUAL GEOLOGY in that the
island was originally formed at the bottom of the sea and, over hundreds of millennia, was literally uplifted from the seabed. In the course of cooling, Cyprus produced remarkably rich copper deposits known as ophiolite deposits. Almost all of this copper can be found in the Upper Pillow Lavas of the Troodos Mountains. Unlike the rest of the island, the Troodos have always been blessed with abundant rainfall. This rainfall is the key to the success of the copper smelting industry of Cyprus. Based upon the huge slag heaps that still cover the island, it has been estimated that over the 3,500 years of its history, the copper industry of Cyprus used 60 million tons of charcoal derived from 1 billion, 200 million cubic meters of pine forest in order to produce 200,000 tons of metallic copper. These figures give you some idea of the extent of the copper industry and why the island has always been regarded as one of the most important sources of copper in the world. The Bronze Age use of copper was centered around the production and trade of one particular object, the copper oxhide ingot. We now know that these peculiar-shaped objects represented the form in which copper was shipped all over the ancient world, especially during the Late Bronze Age, from ancient Babylon in the East to southern France in the West, from Germany in the North to Egypt in the South. The Uluburun shipwreck is a great tribute to the industrial scale of this trade in copper ingots. (The ship was carrying a cargo that included over 10 tons of copper, much of it in the form of some 350 copper oxhide ingots, as well as one ton of tin ingots, many in the same oxhide shape.) Almost all of these ingots were produced on the island of Cyprus and were made of Cypriot copper that had been mined and smelted in the great mining district of Skouriotissa, the same mines later acquired by the Cyprus Mines Corporation. Harvey Seeley Mudd came into the possession of one of these ingots, purchased on the antiquities market around 1930, and donated it to Harvey Mudd College. (More on this later.) These ingots have been known since the middle of the 19th century AD. They were first discovered on Sardinia, in the 1850s, and then found on Crete and on Cyprus. Figures from Pharaonic wall paintings, especially from the tomb of the vizier Rekhmire, ca. 1450 BCE, show figures dressed as Keftiu, an Egyptian name for the
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HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE
island of Crete, carrying such ingots and, since the early Italian excavations at the Minoan site of Ayia Triada had produced a hoard of 19 such ingots, they became known as “Cretan ingots” (German Keftiubarren). That designation seemed very unlikely, however, as Crete has no copper deposits. The modern association of these ingots with Cyprus has come about only through recent archaeological and scientific research. Detailed study of the four stable isotopes of lead, a trace element impurity present in all copper ores, has made it possible to identify the source of the copper used in making these ingots. This research has established that almost all of these ingots, including the one here at the College, were made of Cypriot copper that had been mined in the Skouriotissa area, especially during the years ca. 1400–1200 BCE. Pliny the Elder in his great Natural History, written in the mid first century AD, was not too far wrong when he claimed that Cyprus was the place “where copper was first discovered” (ubi prima aeris inventio). For the next 2,000 years, following Pliny, we know very little about Cypriot copper. This all changed when, on March 10, 1916, Colonel Seeley Mudd (1861–1926), the father of Harvey, along with his financial backers in America, formally created the Cyprus Mines Corporation (CMC) and authorized the sale of 300,000 shares of stock. The purchase price of the land, containing the copper mines around Skouriotissa, was put at $7 million. If you consider the purchase price of the dollar in 1916 you realize that this was an enormous sum of money. Right from the start the CMC demonstrated a serious commitment to Cyprus and to the copper resources of the island. How did all this come about?
The first thing to realize is that the entire Mudd family had a serious commitment to mining, not just in copper and not just in Cyprus. Under Colonel Mudd, the family was involved in mining all over the world, operating mines in California, Colorado, Arizona, Mexico and Peru in copper as well as silver, gold and lead. This was the basis of the family fortune but, for personal reasons, Colonel Mudd always had a special interest in copper mining and in the possibility of re-opening some of the fabled mines of antiquity, especially those on Cyprus because, according to ancient Greek and Latin literary sources, Cyprus had been the great source
Harvey Seeley Mudd acquired this copper oxhide ingot on the antiquities market around 1930 and donated it to Harvey Mudd College, where it is housed in Sprague Center.
of copper from the Greco-Roman world. The second thing one has to understand is that the Mudds were not really miners. They had no interest in mineral prospection or in the mining and smelting of the ores dug out of the ground. They were entrepreneurs, interested in owning mines and financing mining activities. This brings us to the career of Charles Godfrey Gunther (1880–1929), a little-known figure, but one who played a critical role involving the Mudd family in Cyprus. Gunther was a prospector and mineral geologist who had spent his early years in unsuccessful prospecting for mines in the New World. At the same time the Mudd family had experienced a number of failed exploration efforts in New Mexico, Arizona and Mexico. In frustration Gunther went back to the Brooklyn of his birth. There, from a lifetime of extensive reading, he came across a book by an American missionary, Horatius Bonar: The Desert of Sinai: Notes of a Spring-Journey from Cairo to Beersheba, published in 1857. Here Gunther came upon very convincing descriptions of ancient