Several examples of copper alloys between about 6 and 15 per cent of zinc have been identified coming from the Near and Middle East from the later second millennium BCE (Craddock, 1978,updated by Bayley, 1998), between 12 and 15%of zinc from Nuzi, Iraq (Bedore and Dixon, 1998)and a finger ring with about 12% of zinc from Ugarit, Syria (Schaeffer-Forrer, et al., 1982).Several of the ‘bronze’ bowls excavated from Assyrian Nimrud of the 7th century BCE also contain significant quantities of zinc (Hughes, et al., 1988). At just this time the Assyrian records make reference to a special copper, ‘copper of the mountain’ (Halleux, 1973). References to ‘special’ coppers occur throughout the literature of antiquity, but this one is of especial interest to the study of brass as very soon afterwards there are references in Greek literature to oreichalkos, literally ‘copper of the mountain’, in what has become known as the Orientalising phase of Greekculture in the seventh and sixth centuries BC, when many ideas were absorbed from Greece’s neighbours to the East. References to oreichalkoscontinue through the first millennium BC, and together with its Latin derivative, aurichalcum,there is no doubt that by the end of the millennium the words referred to brass. It seems likely that the original ‘copper of the mountain’ was obtained by smelting a natural copper-zinc ore, but at sometime this would have changed to a more assured production by the addition of zinc minerals to copper. It is possible that a memory of this transition is preserved in Pliny’s statement in the Natural History (N.H. 34. 2-4, Rackham, 1952,p.129) that the ore producing aurichalcum was long since exhausted, but that the copper now obtained from other locations readily absorbed cadmea.