Gold in Hendalarsk
"Finding gold in Hendalarsk is like finding a whale in a mountain" - a traditional Kembrek 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 Kembrek 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 Kembrek, 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, dí Aure, was adopted from the Kembrek owr as a result of this.
Consequences
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. Kembrek culture retains vestiges of ancient gold reverence, most notably in the Kembrek custom of using golden wedding bands, but even among the Kembrek 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 Kembre are typically made of brass or silver. 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".
Economic
The absence of gold meant that pre-modern states in Hendalarsk were compelled to use copper currency as the principal unit of exchange; paradoxically this meant that the Zalgis watershed, in particular the economic sphere of Zalgisbeck, saw relatively early adoption of both large-scale monetisation (since copper coinage was of more use in basic agricultural and urban transactions than gold, and represented less of an economic burden if small quantities were lost) and bills of exchange (since copper coinage was not adequate for very large-scale commercial transactions). With the rise of the gold standard, however, Hendalarskara money was disadvantaged, since it was effectively unable to be backed by gold and Hendalarskara financial officials in any case saw this as deeply undesirable. This is held by many economic historians to be a major contributing factor to Hendalarsk's economic stagnation from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, and therefore to the Hendalarskara Civil War. The abandonment of the international gold standard in the later twentieth century, however, led to renewed confidence in the Hendalarskara currency from both domestic and international observers, and this in turn has contributed to Hendalarsk's relatively stable economic progress since the 1960s.
Technological
Gold is prized in contemporary electronics and aerospace applications for its corrosion resistance and ability to reflect electromagnetic radiation. Its total absence from Hendalarsk therefore posed a problem in the early years of the modern Hendalarskara electronics industry, and for the Hendalarskara space and science programme. Fortunately for the Hendalarskara economy, however, platinum shares many of the same qualities as gold and, although rare on a global scale, is commonly (in relative terms) found in association with copper deposits. New processes for the handling and refining of copper ore tailings since the 1980s have therefore resulted in sufficient domestic platinum production to meet the demands of specialist industry, although less strategically important sectors such as consumer electronics have had to make do with either copper or silver (itself somewhat less common in Hendalarsk than the global average).