Iron production in Ptolemaic Egypt: From the Abu Gerida specular hematite mines to the Hamama smelting workshop

Abstract

Although ancient Egypt has a firmly established record of mining and metallurgy of gold and copper, iron production in ancient Egypt is less well documented. Evidence of ancient iron manufacture in Egypt is to be found in the burnt plant remains, slag fragments, and a furnace‐like structure discovered in the Hamama workshop in the Eastern Desert of Egypt. The iron ore required for iron production was delivered from the nearby specular hematite mines of the Abu Gerida area. This Egyptian specularite is geochemically distinguished from other Mediterranean varieties of specularite such as those in Elba, Tuscany, and Seriphos Island. The bloomery iron smelting process in the Hamama workshop produced two types of slags: furnace slags and tapping slags. These two types show different petrographic features and geochemical signatures. Some of the geochemical signatures of the slags, such as their high calcium contents, were derived from charcoal, while others were related to the ore used during the smelting process. Radiocarbon dating of the charred plant remains from the Hamama workshop suggests that the iron smelting activities took place in the early Ptolemaic era. Iron production was seasonal and was conducted by locals who most likely had dynamic socioeconomic ties with the urban centers of the Nile valley.

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“…A complication may probably be related to the fact that the Mn content is often more variable in iron ores than the contents of most other lithophile elements. This promotes a higher variation of Mn in slag [97][98][99]. Therefore, we included Mn into the multivariate dataset [38,50,62,69], and we used P for filtering purposes only.…”