What a coinkidink, I just finished watching episode 2 of "Connections" with James Burke which mentions this in the beginning of the episode, when talking about the invention of currency. The article from Egypt Today doesn't seem to mention the discovery of touchstone (which the episode does), which seemed like an important detail of "why gold?".
It necessarily has a unit of account, but you can undertake all kinds of transactions under a credit system with nobody involved exchanging, or intending to exchange, that actual thing (silver coins, goats, bails of flax, abstract “favors”, whatever)
I had the same question about touchstone from the same episode. I am becoming a Burke-ite after digging up the mention of 'The Trigger Effect' episode of the 70's 'Connections' from an HN Crowdstrike thread and am now binge-watching the entire first series. Amazing stuff.
I'd recently read 'The Ascent of Money', Ferguson, and was thinking there's more to be understood than what I found there. I've got 'Debt: The First 5000 Years', Graeber, in my queue, but am looking for other resources. Any ideas?
of course this wasn't the first currency; currencies had been in use for millennia at that point. it was the first coinage of the metals they were already using as currencies
Coins (specie that had a direct connection to a ruler, usually with the name or visage of the ruler struck on them) were invented to facilitate war. They were given to soldiers to allow them to participate in the economy of the conquered. Since the free peasantry wouldn't trade with them (unreliable: they "died for a living"). The ruler demanded to be paid taxes in his own coin. This solved several important problems: reduction of military unrest against the ruler, free peasantry became a reliable source of goods and services, and the ruler could make war as needed. A market economy emerged as a side effect.
I had always (superficially) assumed the ruler as part of coinage was, somehow, to lend 'officialness' to the currency. But your informed and informative comment makes sense. Many thanks.-
Huato doesn't seem to have read the first line of page 22, as Graber actually refutes the claim that money and debt co-emerged. As far as the Cato institute's criticism is concerned, that section is almost entirely free of specificity, unsurprisingly considering how right-wing Cato is in general. All accounts are flawed to some degree, these criticisms you point to are almost entirely ideological or non specific.
the page also contains criticisms from left-wing and even anarchist thinkers; basically their criticism is that graeber's work amounts to storytelling, a cartoon version of history as you said, not research
this is utter speculation; we don't have anywhere near the level of archaeological evidence about the social relations of 7th-century lydia necessary to make statements like this. no inscriptions survive in lydian from that century or the following century, except for the occasional graffito, plus of course words struck on coins. even from later in lydian history, we only have a few dozen texts of any length. the kings before gyges are quasi-mythical; we don't even know how kroisos, the most famous of gyges' successors spelled his own name. we don't know how kroisos's taxation system worked. we don't know if the peasantry was free or enslaved. we certainly don't have any contemporary accounts of social relations between soldiers and peasantry
however, we do know that rulers around the mediterranean were levying taxes and making war for thousands of years before the lydians started making specie into coins
we weren't talking about money; we were talking about 'Coins (specie that had a direct connection to a ruler, usually with the name or visage of the ruler struck on them)'
those specifically emerged in 7th century lydia, and that emergence is what the article is about
Rulers being on coinage was a later invention. The earliest coins used symbols for the issuing authority, for example the famous Athens owl tetradrachm.
A lot of the remainder of your comment about soldiers and being invented for war is rather speculative and needs sources.
coldtea there is generally considered to be incorrect; as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coin#Lydian_and_Ionian_electru... says, 'The earliest coins are mostly associated with Iron Age Anatolia of the late 7th century BC, and especially with the kingdom of Lydia,' which is what this article is about
there's the very curious fact that somehow china had exactly the same innovation within a few decades, so it's possible they were actually first
>The oldest coins on the planet are believed to date to approximately the second half of the seventh century BC during the reign of King Alyattes who was in power in Lydia from 619 to 560 BC.
This was nowhere near the first currency. Not even the first coins...
There's also cowry-as-coinage, which seems to be very old and very distributed (Africans, Arabs, Indians, Southeast Asians, and East Asians were still using cowry for international trade to the dawn of the Industrial Age)
Indeed, the Chinese kanji for money stems from Cowry. 貝
Incidentally, as an Indonesian, I just recognized the shells we children used to play was exactly this species! Ancient currency, of which millions from thousands of disparate culture used to toil and fight for, used for children game tokens... Haha.
Kroisos made the first gold and silver coins, who was from Lydia. There's a common misbelief that Lydia made the first coins which is simply false, even ignoring the east asian coinage there's earlier electrum pieces (with no design or simple geometric design as one would perhaps expect in a transition from simple bullion)
I wasn't aware of that, but still the linked article is only depicting and talking about the earlier electrum coinage, while saying "gold, silver" in the headline.
Not sure why this is on HN anyway ... a useless article with minimal information, and not news in any shape or form!
The article is terrible agreed. It actually happens to have a picture of the gold type (with the footer "Lycia coin - social media"). The pictures below that are electrum, however.
If anyone wants a decent history of gold-as-currency, Peter Bernstein's The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession is pretty good (second edition has a preface by Volker):
> Incorporating myth, history and contemporary investigation, Bernstein tells the story of how human beings have become intoxicated, obsessed, enriched, impoverished, humbled and proud for the sake of gold. From the past to the future, Bernstein's portrayal of gold is intimately linked to the character of humankind.
One of the interesting things I learned from RegEx searching all books published prior to 1918 was that the earliest minted coins were minted in Lydia.
Another interesting finding was the story of flexible glass. Though almost certainly a fabrication, it is nonetheless instructive of the nature of value (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_glass).
For a good book on ancient economy, I found The Open Sea: The Economic Life of the Ancient Mediterranean World from the Iron Age to the Rise of Rome by J.G. Manning an interesting read:
> In The Open Sea , J. G. Manning offers a major new history of economic life in the Mediterranean world in the Iron Age, from Phoenician trading down to the Hellenistic era and the beginning of Rome's imperial supremacy. Drawing on a wide range of ancient sources and the latest social theory, Manning suggests that a search for an illusory single "ancient economy" has obscured the diversity of lived experience in the Mediterranean world, including both changes in political economies over time and differences in cultural conceptions of property and money. At the same time, he shows how the region's economies became increasingly interconnected during this period.
> The Open Sea argues that the keys to understanding the region's rapid social and economic change during the Iron Age are the variety of economic and political solutions its different cultures devised, the patterns of cross-cultural exchange, and the sharp environmental contrasts between Egypt, the Near East, and Greece and Rome. The book examines long-run drivers of change, such as climate, together with the most important economic institutions of the premodern Mediterranean--coinage, money, agriculture, and private property. It also explores the role of economic growth, states, and legal institutions in the region's various economies.
Leans slightly academic, but still very accessible to a layman. Also the more academic Ancient Greek Law in the 21st Century edited by Paula Jean Perlman:
> The ancient Greeks invented written law. Yet, in contrast to later societies in which law became a professional discipline, the Greeks treated laws as components of social and political history, reflecting the daily realities of managing society. To understand Greek law, then, requires looking into extant legal, forensic, and historical texts for evidence of the law in action. From such study has arisen the field of ancient Greek law as a scholarly discipline within classical studies, a field that has come into its own since the 1970s. This edited volume charts new directions for the study of Greek law in the twenty-first century through contributions from eleven leading scholars. The essays in the book’s first section reassess some of the central debates in the field by looking at questions about the role of law in society, the notion of “contracts,” feuding and revenge in the court system, and legal protections for slaves engaged in commerce. The second section breaks new ground by redefining substantive areas of law such as administrative law and sacred law, as well as by examining sources such as Hellenistic inscriptions that have been comparatively neglected in recent scholarship. The third section evaluates the potential of methodological approaches to the study of Greek law, including comparative studies with other cultures and with modern legal theory. The volume ends with an essay that explores pedagogy and the relevance of teaching Greek law in the twenty-first century.
Did you know that one of the largest banks in Ancient Athens was owned/run by two slaves? It seems that making money from finance was 'undignified'—proper citizens a...
The innovation of coinage is to standardize the unit mass and value, i.e. to create easily usable units. The specific image on the coin authenticates the mass and value given to the unit. This is an UX improvement over using different shapes (jewelry or other non-standard gold pieces) as money, which need to be weighed every time you trade. Gold was used as money before coinage.
A consistent problem I’ve noticed with Graeber is that he seems to attract strident critics who don’t appear to have done more than skim the book they’re criticizing—and maybe not even all of it. It’s as if they read some sentence they don’t like, then red-out from anger for a few pages, then keep going and soon it happens again.
It’s really inconvenient if you’re actually interested in reading good-faith commentary on his work.
I quite liked the book actually, but a consistent problem with it is that if you have a half-decent familiarity with some of the relevant background it's basically impossible not to spot that it's full of errors, some of them pretty innocuous and others pretty glaring. Thing is, if you can't help noticing that Apple Computer wasn't, in fact, a non-hierarchical organization formed by ex-IBM engineers working in groups of 20-40 using laptops(!) in their garages and know enough about bond trading to realise than investors aren't getting involved as a means of paying tribute to governments, it's not unreasonable to wonder whether some of the stuff about ancient coinage and unusual tribal approaches to indebtedness might also be embellishments of misunderstood anecdotes or completely the wrong way round.
It's really inconvenient that the general response to this by Graeber and his acolytes has been to insist that anyone with the temerity to suggest it might be flawed must be doing so in bad faith.
41 comments
[ 97.9 ms ] story [ 2196 ms ] threadAnd the first geeky numismatist showed up in 599BC looking for one in mint condition, uncirculated, of course.
Seems it's available on the Internet Archive too: https://archive.org/details/james-burke-connections_s01e02
See also:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
I'd recently read 'The Ascent of Money', Ferguson, and was thinking there's more to be understood than what I found there. I've got 'Debt: The First 5000 Years', Graeber, in my queue, but am looking for other resources. Any ideas?
however, we do know that rulers around the mediterranean were levying taxes and making war for thousands of years before the lydians started making specie into coins
those specifically emerged in 7th century lydia, and that emergence is what the article is about
Edit: oops, from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41020808 I think maybe we'd better just excise that whole bit.
there's the very curious fact that somehow china had exactly the same innovation within a few decades, so it's possible they were actually first
This was nowhere near the first currency. Not even the first coins...
Indeed, the Chinese kanji for money stems from Cowry. 貝
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_money
[1] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%B2%9D
Incidentally, as an Indonesian, I just recognized the shells we children used to play was exactly this species! Ancient currency, of which millions from thousands of disparate culture used to toil and fight for, used for children game tokens... Haha.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones
Generally anything can be used as money if people agree to it. There is nothing inherent in in gold/silver/shells/whatever that make them "money".
Debt, the first 5000 years:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=8997844...
Not sure why this is on HN anyway ... a useless article with minimal information, and not news in any shape or form!
> Incorporating myth, history and contemporary investigation, Bernstein tells the story of how human beings have become intoxicated, obsessed, enriched, impoverished, humbled and proud for the sake of gold. From the past to the future, Bernstein's portrayal of gold is intimately linked to the character of humankind.
* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/249245
People may be more familiar with his book Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/128429.Against_the_Gods
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_L._Bernstein
Another interesting finding was the story of flexible glass. Though almost certainly a fabrication, it is nonetheless instructive of the nature of value (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_glass).
> In The Open Sea , J. G. Manning offers a major new history of economic life in the Mediterranean world in the Iron Age, from Phoenician trading down to the Hellenistic era and the beginning of Rome's imperial supremacy. Drawing on a wide range of ancient sources and the latest social theory, Manning suggests that a search for an illusory single "ancient economy" has obscured the diversity of lived experience in the Mediterranean world, including both changes in political economies over time and differences in cultural conceptions of property and money. At the same time, he shows how the region's economies became increasingly interconnected during this period.
> The Open Sea argues that the keys to understanding the region's rapid social and economic change during the Iron Age are the variety of economic and political solutions its different cultures devised, the patterns of cross-cultural exchange, and the sharp environmental contrasts between Egypt, the Near East, and Greece and Rome. The book examines long-run drivers of change, such as climate, together with the most important economic institutions of the premodern Mediterranean--coinage, money, agriculture, and private property. It also explores the role of economic growth, states, and legal institutions in the region's various economies.
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36854772-the-open-sea
* https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691151748/th...
Leans slightly academic, but still very accessible to a layman. Also the more academic Ancient Greek Law in the 21st Century edited by Paula Jean Perlman:
> The ancient Greeks invented written law. Yet, in contrast to later societies in which law became a professional discipline, the Greeks treated laws as components of social and political history, reflecting the daily realities of managing society. To understand Greek law, then, requires looking into extant legal, forensic, and historical texts for evidence of the law in action. From such study has arisen the field of ancient Greek law as a scholarly discipline within classical studies, a field that has come into its own since the 1970s. This edited volume charts new directions for the study of Greek law in the twenty-first century through contributions from eleven leading scholars. The essays in the book’s first section reassess some of the central debates in the field by looking at questions about the role of law in society, the notion of “contracts,” feuding and revenge in the court system, and legal protections for slaves engaged in commerce. The second section breaks new ground by redefining substantive areas of law such as administrative law and sacred law, as well as by examining sources such as Hellenistic inscriptions that have been comparatively neglected in recent scholarship. The third section evaluates the potential of methodological approaches to the study of Greek law, including comparative studies with other cultures and with modern legal theory. The volume ends with an essay that explores pedagogy and the relevance of teaching Greek law in the twenty-first century.
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36708211-ancient-greek-l...
Did you know that one of the largest banks in Ancient Athens was owned/run by two slaves? It seems that making money from finance was 'undignified'—proper citizens a...
It’s really inconvenient if you’re actually interested in reading good-faith commentary on his work.
It's really inconvenient that the general response to this by Graeber and his acolytes has been to insist that anyone with the temerity to suggest it might be flawed must be doing so in bad faith.