other
shells by using the plastic yellow metal which was lying about in these
deserts unused and unappreciated. This practice first gave to the metal
gold an arbitrary value which it did not possess before. For the
peculiar life-giving attributes of the shells modelled in the yellow
metal came to be transferred to the gold itself. No doubt the lightness
and especially the beauty of such gold models appealed to the early
Egyptians, and were in large measure responsible for the hold gold
acquired over mankind. But this was an outcome of the empirical
knowledge gained from a practice that originally was inspired purely by
cultural and not aesthetic motives. The earliest Egyptian hieroglyphic
sign for gold was a picture of a necklace of such amulets; and this
emblem became the determinative of the Great Mother Hathor, not only
because she was originally the personification of the life-giving
shells, but also because she was the guardian deity both of the Eastern
wadys where the gold was found and of the Red Sea coasts where the
cowries were obtained. Hence she became the "Golden Hathor," the
prototype of the "Golden Aphrodite".

[Illustration: Fig. 9.--The Egyptian emblem for gold, the sign _nub_. It
represents a collar from which golden amulets, probably representing
cowries, are suspended.]

It is a significant token of the influence of these Egyptian incidents
upon the history of the AEgean that among the earliest gold ornaments
found by Schliemann at Troy were a series of crude representations of
cowries worn as pendants to a hair ornament.[437]

It is hardly necessary to insist upon the vast influence upon the
history of civilization which this arbitrary value of gold has been
responsible for exerting. For more than fifty centuries men have been
searching for the precious metal, and have been spreading abroad
throughout the world the elements of our civilization. It has been not
only the chief factor in bringing about the contact of peoples[438] and
incidentally in building up our culture, but it has been the cause,
directly or indirectly, of most of the warfare which has afflicted
mankind. Yet these mighty forces were let loose upon the world as the
result of the circumstance that early searchers for an elixir of life
used the valueless metal to make imitations of their shell amulets!

The identification of gold with cowries may not have been the primary
reason for the invention of gold currency. In fact, Profess