Copper

Copper gets its chemical symbol Cu from its Latin name, cuprum. It got that name from the island of Cyprus, the source of much of the ancient Mediterranean world's supply of copper.

But copper was used long before the Roman Empire. It is one of the earliest metals known to humans. One reason for this is that copper occurs not only as ores (compounds that must be converted to metal), but occasionally as native copper—actual metal found that way in the ground. In prehistoric times an early human could simply find a chunk of copper and hammer it into a tool with a rock. (Copper is very malleable, meaning that it can be hammered easily into various shapes, even without heating.)

Native copper was mined and used in the Tigris-Euphrates valley (modern Iraq) as long as 7,000 years ago. Copper ores have been mined for at least 5000 years because it is fairly easy to get the copper out of them. For example, if a copper oxide ore (CuO) is heated in a wood fire, the carbon in the charcoal can reduce the oxide to metal: