When the strength of the Kingdom of Pontus is discussed, most of the attention goes to the wars of Mithridates, the rock-cut tombs of Amaseia and the struggle against Rome. Yet the sword, spear and armor of any army are first of all the work of a mine and a smithy. Ancient writers, when they speak of the mountains of the south-eastern Black Sea, make clear that iron production was one of the things that struck them most, and the people who carried it out entered many texts, from Greek poetry to geography books, under the name of the Chalybes. Because the general mining history of Amasya and the silver of Gümüşhacıköy are treated in separate articles, the emphasis here is on antiquity and on the Chalybes: who they were, how ancient authors described them, how mining was carried out in the region, and where Amaseia stands in this picture.

The Homeland and Name of the Chalybes

Classical authors report that the Chalybes, and the Chaldoi (Chaldaioi) who are often named alongside them, lived in the northern part of Pontus and Cappadocia. Their land was called Chaldia: a narrow, mountainous belt extending from the Halys (Kızılırmak) river eastward toward Pharnakeia (Giresun) and Trapezus (Trabzon), and southward toward Lesser Armenia. Strabo writes that the people called Chaldaei in his own day had formerly been named Chalybes, and that Pharnakeia lies directly opposite their country. The coastal strip is extremely narrow, because mountains full of mines and forests rise immediately above the sea and little land can be cultivated. The livelihood of the region therefore ran along two lines: mining in the mountains and, at sea, the fishing of pelamydes and dolphins. Strabo adds that dolphin fat was used here for every purpose.

The name Chalyb itself says something about the reputation of these people. The Greek word chalyps, meaning tempered iron and steel, is identical with the name of the people and passed into Latin as chalybs, again meaning steel. Some modern scholars therefore regard Chalyb not as the name of an actual tribe but as the label of an occupational group. According to Ivan Diakonoff, the Greeks may have used the name for all the communities on the Pontic coast that traded in iron ore; in some cases one may even suspect that Chalyb and Moschoi were outsiders' names for the Chaldoi, who in reality lived between the Tibareni and the Mossynoikoi. Xavier de Planhol's article of 1963 asks the same question in its title: is Chalyb the name of a people, or the qualifier of a trade? Maria Beatrice Bittarello's study of 2022 again discusses whether the Chalybes can be treated as a historical people. A firm verdict is not possible, and both interpretations remain defensible.

The ethnic origin of the Chalybes is also disputed. Apollonius of Rhodes, in the Argonautica, counts them among the Scythians. Some modern historians instead argue that the Chalybes were a Kartvelian-speaking community; Kalistrat Salia considers this view indisputable and regards the Zans, a Kartvelian-speaking group that lived in the lands of present-day Turkey, as their descendants. In Armenian sources the corresponding name is Xaltik', and the seventh-century Geography of Armenia reports that the Chaldians called the Black Sea Kakamar. Archibald Sayce, for his part, connected the name Chalyb with a Hittite word meaning the land of the Halys river. None of these proposals is generally accepted, and they remain at the level of possibility.

The Chalybes in the Accounts of Ancient Authors

The earliest literary trace associated with the Chalybes lies in the lines Homer wrote about the Halizones, who appear among the allies of Troy. In the Iliad's catalogue the Halizones come from far-off Alybe, where silver is born. Strabo devotes a long discussion to this line. In his view the text originally read "from Chalybe far away," or else the people were formerly called Alybes, since names change greatly over time, especially among barbarian peoples; the Thracian Sinties, who became Sinti and then Saioi, are his example. He considers it unreasonable that Demetrius of Scepsis and other critics sought Alybe in Mysia or around Ephesus, because those places are close to Troy and do not fit the expression "from far away." Strabo says that today only iron is extracted in the Chalybian country, but that silver mines may have existed there in earlier times. He adds that there is no reason to think a place could not have become famous for silver: if the fame of the copper mine at Temesa in Italy or of the wealth of Egyptian Thebes could reach Homer, the fame of Chalybian silver could have reached him too. This is an argument and not a document; where Alybe actually lay remains unknown.

The second important account belongs to the legend of the Argonauts. In Apollonius's epic the ship Argo, after passing the land of the Amazons, reaches the country of the Chalybes by evening. The poet writes that this people neither plough with oxen, nor plant fruit trees, nor pasture flocks in the meadow, but break the hard iron-bearing ground and exchange the yield for daily food; for them no morning rises without toil, and they bear their heavy labor amid sooty flames and smoke. Elsewhere in the poem the soil of the Chalybes is described as rugged and unyielding, and the people themselves as the most wretched of men, sons of toil. Despite its mythical frame, this passage draws an economy in which mining was the principal means of livelihood, and it agrees with Strabo's observation about the coastal strip.

Xenophon's Anabasis contains one of the most concrete records of the Chalybes. During the march of the Ten Thousand to the Black Sea, the Greek army covered seven stages and fifty parasangs through the country of the Chalybes in eastern Anatolia, and Xenophon writes that these were the bravest men they met on the whole march. They wore linen cuirasses reaching to the groin, with thickly plaited cords hanging below the waist in place of the usual strips; they had greaves and helmets, and at the belt a short sabre about as long as a Laconian dagger. With it they cut the throats of enemies they overcame, severed the heads from the bodies, and carried them off singing and dancing; in their hands they held a spear fifteen cubits long, pointed at one end. They lived in regular villages and had carried their supplies into their strongholds, so that the Greeks could get nothing in that district and lived on the flocks taken from the Taochians. This record shows that the Chalybes were not only smiths but also a hard warrior people. It is nevertheless noted that the people in this passage belong to the Armeno-Chalybes (the branch on the Armenian border, which Pliny calls Armenochalybes) distinguished by ancient writers, and must be kept apart from the iron-working Chalybes of the coast.

Xenophon also speaks of the coastal Chalybes. The Greeks passed through the country of the Mossynoikoi in eight stages and reached the Chalybes. Xenophon writes that these were few in number, lived under the rule of the Mossynoikoi, and drew their livelihood for the most part from mining and forging iron. The army then arrived in the country of the Tibareni. This was more level ground, its strongholds stood on the coast, and Kotyora, a colony of Sinope, lay within Tibarenian territory. These lines show that on this stretch of the Black Sea Greek colonial cities and native mining peoples lived side by side; it is plausible that iron reached the coastal port towns through this neighborhood, but direct ancient evidence for the scale of that trade is limited.

Mining and Production Technique

For a long time the production tradition described by ancient authors lacked archaeological confirmation. The study published in Antiquity in 2020 by Nathaniel Erb-Satullo, Brian Gilmour and Nana Khakhutaishvili aims to fill this gap. The authors state that the south-eastern Black Sea is a key region for the history of iron metallurgy, that classical texts mention its people as producers and even inventors of iron, but that material evidence has been insufficient. Recent archaeological surveys and scanning electron microscope analyses (SEM-EDS) of slags have made it possible to study iron technologies in the region between the middle and the end of the first millennium BC and in the medieval period. The results also shed light on the smelting of iron in a liquid state; where and when this technology first appeared in Western Eurasia, however, remains unclear. The region preserves genuine traces of a metallurgical tradition that the Greek and Roman world admired, but the claim that the Chalybes invented iron cannot be regarded as archaeologically confirmed.

At the basis of production lay the reduction of ore in charcoal-fed furnaces to produce a malleable bloom of iron. When Strabo says that the coastal mountains are full of mines and forests, he implicitly shows that the work required wood as well as ore. Iron was obtained not only from rock ore but, in some places, from black sands on the shore. The Castilian envoy Ruy González de Clavijo, on his journey to Timur in 1403-1406, describes ironworkers' shops beside a harbor, the sea casting up fine black sand, and that sand being gathered and turned into iron. A. A. M. Bryer writes that his article of 1982 began as a note on these black sands, but that the conclusions he reached about Byzantine mines in the Pontos shrank in the course of preparation. The article addresses whether mines such as Chalybian iron, Chaldian silver and Koloneian alum were worked in the Byzantine period; direct sources are few and the question remains largely open. Bryer says that among the silver records listed for the Byzantine period is that of Amaseia in the twelfth century, but that if the reference rests on Abu'l-Fida it must be moved outside the Byzantine period, and that it may point to the galena deposit near Gümüş. This detail belongs to a time long after antiquity and is mentioned here only to show that the region's mining memory contains breaks.

The Kingdom of Pontus and Its Mines

The lands of the Chalybes and the Chaldoi came under the control of the kings of Pontus. Strabo relates that Lesser Armenia was formerly ruled by dynasts who held the Chaldaei and Tibareni as subjects, and whose dominion extended to Trapezus and Pharnakeia. When Mithridates Eupator grew strong, Antipater, son of Sisis, ceded these places to him; Mithridates cared for them so much that he built seventy-five strongholds and deposited most of his treasures in them. Hydara, Basgoedariza and Sinoria were the most notable; the Paryadres mountain range, well watered, wooded and cut by sheer ravines, was suited to this purpose. When Pompey invaded the country, Mithridates withdrew to these remotest parts of the kingdom and was finally forced to flee to Colchis and from there to the Bosporus. Strabo reports that in his own day the Chaldaei and Tibareni, together with Pharnakeia and Trapezus, were under the rule of Pythodoris.

From this account it follows that the iron-producing mountains were bound up with the military and economic interests of the kingdom. It is known that weapons and armor were made of iron and that the iron came from the mountains of the kingdom. Yet Strabo's text gives no figure for the kingdom's iron revenue and does not state outright that the kings based their arms production directly on Chalybian iron; going beyond that enters the realm of assumption. For Kabeira, Strabo additionally writes that besides the palace of Mithridates, the water-mills, the zoological gardens and the hunting grounds, there were mines too. Kabeira lies not in the Chalybian country but south of the Phanaroia valley where the Lycus and the Iris meet; it nevertheless shows that the kings kept mines close to the palace.

Mining Around Amaseia

The real homeland of the Chalybes was not the immediate surroundings of Amaseia but the mountainous belt behind Pharnakeia and Trapezus. Amaseia, on the other hand, was one of the centers of the Pontic kingdom. Strabo, who regarded it as his own city, describes it as lying in the valley of the Iris on a rock that served as both city and fortress, with the palaces and monuments of the kings inside the walls. North of the city come the plain of Chiliokomon and then the districts of Diakopene and Pimolisene, all fertile and extending to the Halys. Amaseia should therefore be thought of less as the source of Chalybian iron than as a center to which that iron came and where it was used, as part of the same kingdom. The relationship between Amaseia and the Chalybes rests not on geographical proximity but on a shared political framework.

Among the mines that can be counted as near Amaseia, the one Strabo describes in most detail is Mount Sandarakourgion, in the territory of Pompeiopolis near the fortress of Pimolisa. The mountain was hollowed out by the extraction of realgar (red arsenic sulphide), the workmen having excavated great cavities beneath it. The mine was worked by publicans, who used as miners slaves sold in the market because of their crimes. Strabo writes that, besides the painfulness of the work, the air in the mines was deadly and the odor of the ore unbearable, so that the workmen died quickly. He adds that the mine was often left idle because it was unprofitable, and that the workmen, more than two hundred in number, were continually spent by disease and death. Bryer notes that Pompeiopolis is Taşköprü and that Sandarakourgion corresponds better with the Ovacık-Hasandeğin deposit than with Gümüş, which Prentiss de Jesus prefers. This mine lies on the Paphlagonian border and what was extracted was not iron, so it must be assessed separately from Chalybian ironworking; even so, it documents that a systematically worked mine existed around Amaseia in antiquity.

Mining and Livelihood

The common picture in the ancient sources is that mining was no comfortable occupation in this geography. Apollonius's description of sooty flames and heavy toil, Strabo's account of the deadly air at Sandarakourgion and Xenophon's note that the mining people were few and lived under another's rule form three separate points on the same line. Agriculture on the narrow coastal strip was inadequate, and the people had to live from the mountain and the sea alike. That the name Chalyb eventually turned into an occupational qualifier seems connected with this activity being so distinctive that outsiders defined the people by it.

All of this knowledge has a limit. Most of the written sources are Greek and Latin texts, and their authors looked at the mines from the outside rather than from within. Direct information about the Chalybes' own language, beliefs and the techniques they used in their furnaces is very scarce. Slag analyses and surveys are trying to make up the deficit; even so, the identity of the Chalybes, where ironworking first appeared, and their real weight in the economy of Pontus remain contested subjects.

Chronology

Winter of 401-400 BC: During the march of the Ten Thousand from eastern Anatolia to the Black Sea coast, Xenophon meets the Armeno-Chalybes and the iron-working Chalybes of the coast.

1st century BC: Mithridates Eupator takes the Chaldoi and Tibareni lands under his rule and, according to Strabo, builds seventy-five strongholds there. Pompey's arrangement reorganizes Pompeiopolis and its surroundings.

Late 1st century BC, early 1st century AD: Strabo of Amaseia writes in the Geographika that the old name of the Chaldaei was Chalybes, that the mines of Pharnakeia then yielded only iron, and that they had formerly yielded silver as well.

1403-1406: The Castilian envoy Clavijo records that iron was being made from black sand cast up by the sea on the Black Sea coast.

1963: Xavier de Planhol publishes his article discussing whether Chalyb is the name of a people or an occupational qualifier.

1982: A. A. M. Bryer publishes his article on the question of Byzantine mines in the Pontos.

2020: Erb-Satullo, Gilmour and Khakhutaishvili examine the iron metallurgy of the south-eastern Black Sea with archaeological and archaeometallurgical data.

Sources

Primary sources

  • Strabo, Geographika (Geography), Book XII, chapter III, 14-40 (Black Sea coast, Chaldaei/Chalybes, the Halizones debate, Pimolisene and Mount Sandarakourgion); translation by H. L. Jones, Loeb Classical Library.

Academic studies

  • Bryer, A. A. M., "The Question of Byzantine Mines in the Pontos: Chalybian Iron, Chaldian Silver, Koloneian Alum and the Mummy of Cheriana", Anatolian Studies 32, 1982, pp. 133-150.

Other sources

  • Xenophon, Anabasis, Book IV chapter 7 and Book V chapter 5 (encounter with the Chalybes).
  • Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica, Book II (the coast of the Chalybes).
  • Erb-Satullo, N. L., Gilmour, B. J. J., Khakhutaishvili, N., "The metal behind the myths: iron metallurgy in the south-eastern Black Sea region", Antiquity 94 (374), 2020, pp. 401-419.
  • Chalybes, Wikipedia (supporting source for references to Diakonoff, Salia, Hewsen and Bittarello): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalybes

Online sources