Gold in Hendalarsk

"Finding gold in Hendalarsk is like finding a whale in a mountain" - a traditional Khunyer proverb, which fell out of use in the 20th century after the discovery that many mountain ranges used to be seabed and were indeed full of whale fossils.

Origins
Hendalarsk is extremely unusual among the countries of the world in that it is home to absolutely no known gold deposits of any size. No gold has ever been panned from Hendalarskara rivers, nor has any ever been found in any of the country's (many) mines throughout the centuries. Scientists have struggled to explain the total absence of the element from the country's rock, since it is present in at least trace concentrations almost everywhere else in the world; at present the most widely-held theory for the lack of native gold is simply "random chance". This, combined with Hendalarsk's ownership of the largest proven copper reserves in the world, has had a wide array of cultural, economic and technological consequences.

Both the Khunyer and Hendalarskara people migrated into the territory that now comprises Hendalarsk from regions of Levantia - and cultural milieux - where gold was present. The country's autochthonous Nünsyak, by contrast, had little or no prior exposure to the metal; their powerful sedentary civilisation was instead oriented around copper, which was used to manufacture jewelry and currency alike. Historical linguists have suggested that Old Central Gothic, the predecessor to Hendalarskisch, likely once had a word for gold, but this was lost within the first few centuries of Gothic settlement in the region. The Khunyer, by contrast, being much later arrivals to the country and from far further afield, both possessed and revered gold in common with most other Levantine cultures. The modern Hendalarskisch word for gold, die Arane, was adopted from the Khunyer arany as a result of this.

Cultural
Even after Hendalarsk's integration into the wider Levantine (and global) cultural sphere, gold has almost no cultural cachet in most of the country. Khunyer culture retains vestiges of ancient gold reverence, most notably in the Khunyer custom of using golden wedding bands, but even among the Khunyer gold is viewed with far less interest than among either neighbouring societies or other Orenstian cultures. Copper has come to fulfil most of the cultural functions held by gold elsewhere; churches are decorated in copper leaf, the archroyal regalia are made of bronze, wedding rings outside Khunyeria are typically made of brass. Even allusions to gold in the Bible were transformed into references to copper, brass and bronze by missionaries translating the text into Hendalarkisch, in an effort to make the relevant proverbs and parables more comprehensible to gold-sceptical neophytes. The Hendalarkisch telling of the Exodus narrative, for example, renders the infamous idol of a golden calf as a "brass calf".