"Mercury was known to the ancient Chinese and Hindus, and has been found in Egyptian tombs dating back to 1500 or 1600 B.C. Dioscorides mentioned its preparation from cinnabar, while Pliny gave a method of purifying it by squeezing it through leather, and stated that it is poisonous. Earle R. Caley has shown by quotations from Aristotle, Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Pliny the Elder, Vitruvius, and the Leyden Papyrus of the third century A.D. that mercury has been known much longer than most persons realize. He states that cinnabar was probably the only mercury compound known to the ancients and that they used it both as a pigment and as a source of the metal. In his "Metallurgic Chemistry," C. E. Gellert (1713-1795) stated that “The only ore of mercury hitherto known is native cinnabar". The most ancient specimen of quicksilver known is probably that which H. Schliemann found in a little cocoanut-shaped in an Egyptian tomb at Kurna dating from the fifteenth or sixteenth century B.C."