Ancient Egyptians used copper in everyday life and the afterlife

The metal copper was found in the funeral tombs of excavation sites and the source of the material has been located at the Sinai Peninsula and the Eastern Desert.

With new technology, archaeologists reconstructed the trade of metals for ancient civilizations around the Mediterranean like Egypt.

Erez Ben-Yosef at Tel Aviv University in Israel led a study that focused on display artifacts like those at Leipzig University’s Egyptian Museum in Germany. The lack of evidence at physical sites in Egypt led archaeologists to use these artifacts to provide insight into the production and economy of copper and other metals. They prove that Egyptians intentionally selected what metal they used for different items and procedures in the ancient society based on differentiated percentages of arsenic composition and qualities. There were different types of metals and minerals found in the artifacts that date from the Predynastic to Old Kingdom Periods of history. The copper found at dig sites was not naturally found in Egypt, but mined from the Eastern Desert and Sinai. Archeologists can now shed even more light on ancient Egyptian metallurgy.

Journal of Archaeological Science (2018)

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2018.04.005