Where was Gold first mined?

Gold is so rare and precious that you would imagine man didnt't discover it until quite recently in his history. But the opposite is true! Gold was one of the first metals known to man.
We will never know when man first found it and began to desire it, since it was long before history was written down. But since gold is found in the free state, that is, it is not always combined with other metals or rocks, it was the first metal that man knew.
The first evidence we have of mining work to obtain gold comes from the Egyptains. They were mining gold more than 5,000 years ago! We also have records to show that the ancient Assyrians were conquering their neighbours to obtain gold about 4,500 years ago!
The Greek and Roman kings also loved gold. They obtained as much gold as possible by stealing from countries which they had conquered and by using slaves to dig in the mines. So you see, the mining of gold goes back to the very beginnings of man.
In the New World, gold must have been mined from very ancient times, too, because when the Spaniards came to Mexico, they found that the Aztecs had huge quantities of gold in their cities. In Peru, SOuth America, the ancient Incas also had collected gold for hundeds of years before the white man came.
The discobery of gold anywhere in the world had always caused a rush of adventurous people to the spot in search of the yellow metal. In the year 1848, a man named John Sutter was building a sawmill in California. James Marshall, who was helping him, noticed some flakes of yellow metal mixed with the gravel from the stream. Tests showed these flakes to be gold.The news of this discovery spread rapidly over the whole world and the "Gold Rush of '49" was on. It was the large number of settlers who came to California in 1849 that started the development of the Pacific Coast region of the United States.