Melted, minted, miscounted: How one piece of gold can span millennia

That is enough to fill roughly four and a half Olympic-sized swimming pools or one giant cube, approximately 22 meters on each side. Moreover, over half of that has been mined and refined only since the 1950s. And about the same amount—roughly 185,000 tonnes—is left to be mined in reserves (what can be exploited economically) and resources (currently too expensive to extract).

But dig a little deeper into gold’s history, and a curious problem emerges: much of this gold has been melted down, recast, reused, looted, buried, rediscovered, and repurposed. In other words, the same gold may have been counted multiple times over the centuries.

So, you may ask, could we have overestimated the amount of it that has existed through history? Let’s find out.

Gold, like diamonds, is forever

An interesting fact about gold is that it can never be destroyed. You can melt, atomise, and dissolve it, but it never truly ‘dies’. The only real way to do that is to cast it back to whence it came, i.e., in nuclear reactions.

For this reason, the gold ring or other jewellery you may be wearing, or the pieces of gold in your computer or smartphone chips, could have been used in a Roman coin or an Egyptian burial mask thousands of years ago. Perhaps both.

But this durability also creates a problem for accounting: the metal is endlessly recycled, so tracking its entire journey from mine to artefact to bullion is almost impossible. When gold is melted down and turned into something new, its past form is often lost to history, unless good records are kept, of course.

When it comes to estimates, the World Gold Council (WGC) has used production figures from governments, mining companies, and industry analysts since 1900. The council also relies on archaeological records, historical accounts, and conservative estimates of ancient mining from earlier periods.

Cross-checking with known global holdings (e.g., jewellery stores, central banks, artefact holdings) helps ensure accuracy, though pre-modern figures are uncertain due to lost or recycled gold.

And because the precious metal has been so central to economies, cultures, religions, and conquests, it has been transformed countless times. This makes it extremely difficult to assess how much ‘new’ gold has entered the global stockpile versus how much old gold is reshaped for new uses.

Gold through the ages

Take ancient Egypt, for example. While we can never really know, estimates suggest the civilization extracted hundreds, perhaps thousands of kilograms of gold from the Earth over its long history. This metal adorned pharaohs, temples, and burial chambers, including Tutankhamun’s famous 22.6 lb (10.23 kg) solid gold mask.

But much of Egypt’s ancient gold was looted by conquerors, especially during the Roman era, and melted down to make coins and other relics. Rome, in turn, plundered Greece and other territories, further ballooning its coffers.

Indeed, while we can’t be entirely sure, the Roman Empire may have controlled as much as 100,000 tons of gold at its height. Emperor Augustus Caesar may have himself controlled around 83,900 tonnes personally.

But when Rome fell, invading tribes, the Byzantine Empire, and later European powers repurposed that same gold—often by melting it and minting new currency again.

This cycle repeated during the Spanish conquest of the Americas when enormous caches of gold held by the Aztec, Inca, and Mayan civilizations were seized and shipped to Europe. These civilizations used gold for sacred artefacts, ornaments, and ceremonial items. For the Spanish, these precious object were simply raw bullion. Nearly everything was melted into coins to fund wars and colonial expansion.

Hence, no wonder that the same gold may have been counted multiple times across centuries, each time in a different form. A golden idol taken from Peru in the 1500s could have become a Spanish doubloon, a French coin, or a bar in a central bank’s vault—every phase potentially contributing to gold production or stockpile estimates.

All that glitters everywhere

While gold’s physical journey is difficult to pin down, its current ownership patterns are equally complex. Governments and central banks today hold large amounts of gold, such as the U.S. at Fort Knox, Germany’s Bundesbank, or the People’s Bank of China. Museums and national collections also retain thousands of tons of archaeological treasures.

For instance, the British Museum, the Louvre, and the Hermitage in Russia each house extensive collections of gold artefacts spanning millennia. Religious institutions, in turn, collectively hold some of the most concentrated caches of ancient gold.

The Vatican possesses countless gold relics, chalices, and artwork. At the same time, Hindu temples in India—notably the Padmanabhaswamy Temple in the southern state of Kerala—are believed to hold billions of dollars worth of gold offerings accumulated over centuries. Buddhist monasteries and Islamic relics too include significant gold components.

Some ancient gold also resides in private collections. A part of it is purchased through auctions, while a good chunk is acquired less transparently. Black market trade, looted artefacts, and lost treasures—like shipwrecked galleons or buried hoards—further complicate things.

It is impossible to estimate, but likely hundreds or thousands of metric tons of the world’s gold is ‘locked up’ in historical artefacts, museum pieces, and religious objects. This could be as much as 5–10% of all the gold ever mined, but again, this is just conjecture.

As discussed already, much of the gold from ancient times (mainly from empires like Roman, Inca, and the Ottoman) was not preserved as artefacts but melted down and reused. In that sense, historical stock has been continually reshuffled. Moreover, unknown gold quantities are still hidden in undiscovered tombs, shipwrecks, or buried hoards. This means they are not yet part of our official gold count and potentially overlap with what has already been melted and recast.

Are we double-counting gold?

So, it looks like we overstating the amount of gold humanity has mined. Modern estimates from institutions like the WGC try to avoid this problem by only counting newly mined gold from credible sources. They base figures on mining production, official records, and known reserves.

But when it comes to historical gold (especially before the modern era), there’s no reliable way to distinguish between newly extracted reserves and recycled stuff. It’s plausible that some of the gold counted in Roman records, Spanish shipping manifests, and modern central bank vaults is the same, only changed in form and ownership.

While this doesn’t reduce the physical stock of gold, it raises questions about how much ‘new’ gold has entered the global economy. Whatever the truth is, it reminds us that, more than any other commodity or money, gold is part of our past, present, and likely future.

Its unique permanence is fascinating. As we continue to account for it in vaults, museums, and national reserves, we may never know exactly how many times the same ounces have been counted. Ultimately, its value isn’t just in its rarity or luster but in its deep connection to our long history, forever melted and remade.