Rud’s father—who had invented bread-baking—continued his work of smelting metal and smelted copper without yet being able to make use of it. The sole use for copper was to harden the pots.
As noted, to the northwest of Sialk, beside Iran’s central lake, there was a city named “Giyan,” whose queen bore the title “Mazun.” In the past, when Iran’s lake had not yet dried up, the inhabitants of Giyan came to Sialk by water. After the lake dried and the surrounding forests disappeared, the two cities of Giyan and Sialk became separated from one another, and great distances also arose between the towns on the southern shores of the dried lake and the city of Sialk.
From then on, traveling from one city to another became difficult, and the people of one city would not learn of events in other cities except after some time. Occasionally a few inhabitants of one city would travel to another, but such journeys were rare; in each city people attended only to themselves and their surroundings, and, moreover, unlike before, they no longer had leisure time to travel. Formerly, as we said at the beginning of this account, obtaining foodstuffs and clothing was not an issue: the chief work of the men was to carve stone, and the chief work of the women was to sew deerskin and turn it into clothing.
The drying of the lake, the disappearance of its forests, the vanishing of herbivorous, useful animals, the necessity of eating wheat by cooking it in earthen pots and then grinding flour and baking bread, the urgent matter of making clothing from sheepskin and felting, and the sowing and reaping of wheat in their appointed seasons—all this created new tasks for men and women that kept them constantly occupied, and the first foundations of agriculture and animal husbandry were laid in Sialk and in other towns, including Giyan.
In the city of Giyan, its queen had a son named “Tam” (with open “tā” and silent “mīm”), and the bigger he grew, the stronger and more handsome he became. When he reached the age of seventeen, anyone who saw him marveled at his broad shoulders, tall stature, wide chest, and thick arms. Tam would go to the mountains and kill sheep, bringing the carcasses down from the heights to Giyan by himself. When he grew older, several of his peers followed him, going with him to the mountains to hunt sheep and bring their carcasses to the city; but none of the youths matched Tam’s skill in the hunt, nor were they as strong as he.
When Tam was not hunting, he, like everyone else, spent his time carving stone, for stone-carving was counted among the important tasks—especially for a youth like Tam, who in the hunt had a pressing need for stone arrowheads, axes, and knives, and for whom a single stone axe or knife was worth more than fifty kills to him and to the other men who hunted. Tam and the other men, from dawn till dusk, would set a stone between their feet and, with a block of granite, carve the stone they held between their legs.
The knowledge of the greatest mining engineer today is of little value compared with the stonecraft knowledge of the ancient Iranians; those who worked with stone all their lives could, at a glance, recognize whether a stone was hard or soft, and knew whether a soft stone would cleave into sheets or not—and if it did, they would not choose it for carving. They knew that granite could not be carved, but must be used as the tool for carving other stones.
When Tam brought down a quarry animal, he would not leave his arrowhead or knife in the carcass, because the value of a single stone knife exceeded fifty kills.
The burly young hunter and stone-carver heard that in the city of Sialk there existed something as hard as stone, but when placed in fire it melted and flowed like water, and after the fire was extinguished it again became hard like stone and could not be broken. Curiosity—one of humankind’s instincts in every age—drove Tam to go to Sialk to see that strange thing, which we know was copper.
