Obsarvations on Mines and Querries in the Byzantine Empire

This is a reprint of an article published in volume 82/2 of Ekklesiastikos Pharos (Alexandria-Johannesburg, 2000), based on a postgraduate seminar delivered in August 1999 at Rand Afrikaans University (now Johannesburg University), in the seminar room of the Department of Greek and Latin Studies, organized by my host and good friend Professor Benjamin Hendrickx. Its usefulness, resting chiefly on numerous primary sources' printouts in a detailed appendix from the Byzantine History Data Bank programme of the Hellenic Research Foundation at Athens, has been observed by, among others, Johannes Koder, Sergei P. Karpov, the late Angelike E. Laiou and Cecile Morrisson, while Morrisson has also recently utilized it in her monograph on Byzantine money. However, the scarcity in research libraries of the journal where it was originally published warranted a reprint, as observed by several colleagues in recent years and I have decided to republish it as a short monograph. At the end I have also included the entry of mines and quarries ("Bergbau") which I contributed (shortly before completion of the article reprinted here) to the "Lexikon der Byzantinistik" on the invitation of Professor Johannes Irmscher; I have taken the opportunity to publish here the entire text of the entry as originally submitted before the inevitable cut and condensations in such publications.