When was Silver ever more valuable than Gold?

Question

These days we pretty much take it as a given that gold is more valuable than silver. The obvious example is the Olympics and other such competitions that give "gold" medals for first place and "silver" for second.

When I was younger I read somewhere that silver was actually rarer than gold in Europe, up until the Spanish started exploiting the New World silver mines, and the massive infusion of silver into Europe devalued it.

I haven't ever seen that stated since, so I doubt its true. However, I did find a reference that silver was in fact rarer in Egypt during the Old Kingdom.

So it seems there probably were extended periods in literate areas where silver was more valuable than gold. What (and when and where) were they?

Answer 1

From "The origin of metallic currency and weight standards" By Sir William Ridgeway (Google books); University Press, 1892

... We saw that the Arabs of the Soudan down to the present day prefer silver to gold whilst in the earlier part of the present century when Japan was opened to European commerce the Japanese eagerly exchanged gold for silver at the rate of one to three and even less as they possessed no native silver and were charmed with the beauty of the little known metal.

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... It is almost certain that in all countries at one stage silver must have been of higher value than gold.

Afterwards as its production became greater it became equal in value and finally little by little much less valuable until at last the relation between the metals is 1/22.

All this on pages 145/146; the earlier pages give some historical document references for these.