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Cyprus was probably not so much a centre of production as a depôt of trade which collected the contributions of adjacent places—e.g. the isle of Siphanos (Sifanto), where copper has been found with iron and lead. Such was the general history of islands and archipelagos outlying barbarous and dangerous coasts on the direct lines of commerce, various sections of the world’s great mercantile zone and highway of transit and traffic. The Cassiterides, also, served as storehouses for the stream-tin and the chalcopyrite (copper pyrites) of Cornwall and of Devonshire, whilst they enjoyed the fame of producing it. During the Middle Ages, Hormuz or Ormuz (Armuza), in the Persian Gulf, served, and Zanzibar still serves, as a centre of import, export, and exchange, as a magazine and as a shipping station for its mainland.

One of the ores which occurs in the greatest number of places[188] and in the largest quantities; having a specific gravity ranging from 8·830 to 8·958; harder and more elastic than silver; the most tenacious of metals after iron and platinum; malleable when cold as well as when hot, so as not to require the furnace; melting at a temperature between the fusion points of silver and gold (1196° F.); and readily cast in sand-beds and moulds, Copper must have been used in the earliest ages, and has continued to our day, when the art of smelting it—at Swansea, for instance, in South Wales—is perhaps more advanced than that of any other ore. When the stone-and-bone weaponed peoples began their rude metallurgy, they would retain, with similar habits of thought, the same principles of design. The old Celtis, Celt, or chisel of serpentine or silex, would be copied in the newly-introduced and gradually-adopted weapon-tool of metal; and the transition would be so gradual that we trace without difficulty the process of development. The first metal blade was probably a dagger of copper, preserving the older shape of wood, horn, and stone: possibly it resembled the copper knife found at Memphis in 1851 by Hekekyan Bey; and this afterwards would grow to a Sword. Wood, stone, copper, and bronze, iron and steel, must long have been used simultaneously, slowly making way for one another, as the musket took the place of the matchlock, the rifle of the musket.