Today we think of plated items as being cheap. I believe that would be basically space age technology in ancient Babylon. I don’t think they had any electrical or chemical way of plating anything. Not only that, I bet you would need to use very pure copper to plate something.
You’re absolutely right, if it was actually plating. However, given the contract was for copper ingots, I’d guess the poor quality copper was copper cast into an ingot shape around something worthless rather than what we would consider plating. It could also have been much more about impurities and ores left over from an incomplete smelting/refining process such that trying to hammer or cast the copper resulted in lots of worthless slag.
Today we think of plated items as being cheap. I believe that would be basically space age technology in ancient Babylon. I don’t think they had any electrical or chemical way of plating anything. Not only that, I bet you would need to use very pure copper to plate something.
You’re absolutely right, if it was actually plating. However, given the contract was for copper ingots, I’d guess the poor quality copper was copper cast into an ingot shape around something worthless rather than what we would consider plating. It could also have been much more about impurities and ores left over from an incomplete smelting/refining process such that trying to hammer or cast the copper resulted in lots of worthless slag.
I’m talking about the comic
Fair enough.