Source of mercury

    Mercury was found in Egyptian tombs that date from 1500 BC; cinnabar, the most common natural source of mercury, has been in use since the Neolithic Age.
    In China and Tibet, mercury use was thought to prolong life, heal fractures, and maintain generally good health, although it is now known that exposure to mercury vapor leads to serious adverse health effects.The first emperor of a unified China, Qín Shǐ Huáng Dì-allegedly buried in a tomb that contained rivers of flowing mercury on a model of the land he ruled, representative of the rivers of China-was reportedly killed by drinking a mercury and powdered jade mixture formulated by Qin alchemists intended as an elixir of immortality.Khumarawayh ibn Ahmad ibn Tulun, the second Tulunid ruler of Egypt (r. 884–896), known for his extravagance and profligacy, reportedly built a basin filled with mercury, on which he would lie on top of air-filled cushions and be rocked to sleep.
    In November 2014 "large quantities" of mercury were discovered in a chamber 60 feet below the 1800-year-old pyramid known as the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, the third-largest pyramid of Teotihuacan, Mexico, along with "jade statues, jaguar remains, a box filled with carved shells and rubber balls". In Lamanai, once a major city of the Maya civilization, a pool of mercury was found under a marker in a Mesoamerican ballcourt.
    Aristotle recounts that Daedalus made a wooden statue of Aphrodite move by pouring quicksilver in its interior In Greek mythology Daedalus gave the appearance of voice in his statues using quicksilver. The ancient Greeks used cinnabar (mercury sulfide) in ointments; the ancient Egyptians and the Romans used it in cosmetics. By 500 BC mercury was used to make amalgams (Medieval Latin amalgama, "alloy of mercury") with other metals.
    Alchemists thought of mercury as the First Matter from which all metals were formed. They believed that different metals could be produced by varying the quality and quantity of sulfur contained within the mercury. The purest of these was gold, and mercury was called for in attempts at the transmutation of base (or impure) metals into gold, which was the goal of many alchemists.
The mines in Almadén (Spain), Monte Amiata (Italy), and Idrija (now Slovenia) dominated mercury production from the opening of the mine in Almadén 2500 years ago, until new deposits were found at the end of the 19th century.
    Beginning in 1558, with the invention of the patio process to extract silver from ore using mercury, mercury became an essential resource in the economy of Spain and its American colonies. Mercury was used to extract silver from the lucrative mines in New Spain and Peru. Initially, the Spanish Crown's mines in Almadén in Southern Spain supplied all the mercury for the colonies. Mercury deposits were discovered in the New World, and more than 100,000 tons of mercury were mined from the region of Huancavelica, Peru, over the course of three centuries following the discovery of deposits there in 1563.]In 1786 the main mine at Huancavelica suffered a sudden collapse that killed over 100 persons and greatly reduced the mine's output.Through the legalization of scavanging known as pallaqueo mercury production rose again peaking in 1794–1796. The French Revolutionary Wars disrupted European mercury supply to Spanish America leading to an increasing reliance for the mines in present-day Peru and Bolivia on mercury from Huancavelica but this mines production was clearly by 1799 not enough to supply the demand in the Andean mines.Spain abolished the royal mercury monopoly in 1813.
    Mercury poisoning in the mines left many people disabled through the early modern period but mercury itself was not the chief cause of deaths in the mines.
    The patio process and later pan amalgamation process continued to create great demand for mercury to treat silver ores until the late 19th century.