A soft reddish metal known since ancient times.

It is the main constituent of a wide range of alloys such as aluminium bronze, brass, bronze, cupro-nickel, gun metal, Orichalchum, and Pinchbeck.

Source: http://www.tclayton.demon.co.uk/metal.html

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Native copper, i.e. copper metal, is thought to have been the first metal used by man and may have used in ancient Turkey and Mesopotamia by about the seventh millennium BC. Native copper is abundantly available in large masses in the Great Lakes region of North America and was used fairly extensively by the North American Indians to make weapons and implements solely by hammering and annealing so that casting and smelting was not attempted. Clear early evidence for smelting copper comes from the Middle East from about the fourth to third millennium BC onwards, from parts of Israel, Jordan and Egypt where copper oxide ores such as green malachite were smelted at temperatures of around 1200^oC.

Early copper artifacts of about the sixth millennium BC are also reported from the pre-Indus Valley sites of Baluchistan in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent close to the Iranian border. There is also some evidence for smelting furnaces from the Harappan civilizations of the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent. There is fairly extensive evidence for the ancient mining of copper ores from the Khetri region of Rajasthan in northwestern India dating to about the 3rd-2nd millennium BC.

Arsenical copper was also in use in Mesopotamia, prior to the use of tin bronzes, of which the most famous and extraordinary examples are the bronze bulls of the third millennium BC where the enrichment of arsenic at the surface is found to give it a shiny coating.