The history of money spans thousands of years. Numismatics is the scientific study of money and its history in all its varied forms.
Many items have been used as commodity money such as naturally scarce precious metals, cowry shells, barley, beads etc., as well as many other things that are thought of as having value.
Modern money (and most ancient money) is essentially a token — in other words, an abstraction. Paper currency is perhaps the most common type of physical money today. However, objects of gold or silver present many of money's essential properties. The term Price system is sometimes used to refer to methods using commodity valuation or money accounting systems.
The emergence of money
The Sumer civilization developed a large scale economy based on commodity money. The Babylonians and their neighboring city states later developed the earliest system of economics as we think of it today, in terms of rules on debt, legal contracts and law codes relating to business practices and private property.
The Code of Hammurabi ( Codex Hammurabi ), the best preserved ancient law code, was created ca. 1760 BC (middle chronology) in ancient Babylon. It was enacted by the sixth Babylonian king, Hammurabi. Earlier collections of laws include the codex of Ur-Nammu, king of Ur (ca. 2050 BC), the Codex of Eshnunna (ca. 1930 BC) and the codex of Lipit-Ishtar of Isin (ca. 1870 BC). These law codes formalized the role of money in civil society. They set amounts of interest on debt... fines for 'wrong doing'... and compensation in money for various infractions of formalized law.
The Shekel referred to an ancient unit of weight and currency. The first usage of the term came from Mesopotamia circa 3000 BC. and referred to a specific mass of barley which related other values in a metric such as silver, bronze, copper etc. A barley/shekel was originally both a unit of currency and a unit of weight... just as the British Pound was originally a unit denominating a one pound mass of silver.
In cultures where metal working was unknown, shell or ivory jewelry were the most divisible, easily storable and transportable, scarce, and hard to counterfeit objects that could be made. It is highly unlikely that there were formal markets in 100,000 BCE (any more than there are in recently observed hunter-gatherer cultures). Nevertheless, proto-money would have been useful in reducing the costs of less frequent transactions that were crucial to hunter-gatherer cultures, especially bride purchase, splitting property upon death, tribute, and inter-tribal trade in hunting ground rights (“starvation insurance”) and implements.
In the absence of a medium of exchange, non-monetary societies operated largely along the principles of gift economics. When barter did in fact occur, it was usually between either complete strangers or would-be enemies.
Commodity Money
Main article: Commodity moneyBartering has several problems, most notably the coincidence of wants problem. For example, if a wheat farmer needs what a fruit farmer produces, a direct swap is impossible as seasonal fruit would spoil before the grain harvest. A solution is to trade fruit for wheat indirectly through a third, "intermediate", commodity: the fruit is exchanged for the intermediate commodity when the fruit ripens. If this intermediate commodity doesn't perish and is reliably in demand throughout the year (e.g. copper, gold, or wine) then it can be exchanged for wheat after the harvest. The function of the intermediate commodity as a store-of-value can be standardized into a widespread commodity money, reducing the coincidence of wants problem. By overcoming the limitations of simple barter, a commodity money makes the market in all other commodities more liquid.
Many cultures around the world eventually developed the use of commodity money. Ancient China and Africa used cowrie shells. Trade in Japan's feudal system was based on the koku - a unit of rice per year. The shekel was an ancient unit of weight and currency. The first usage of the term came from Mesopotamia circa 3000 BC and referred to a specific weight of barley, which related other values in a metric such as silver, bronze, copper etc. A barley/shekel was originally both a unit of currency and a unit of weight.
Where ever trade is common, barter systems usually lead quite rapidly to several key goods being imbued with monetary properties. In the early British colony of New South Wales, rum emerged quite soon after settlement as the most monetary of goods. When a nation is without a currency it commonly adopts a foreign currency. In prisons where conventional money is prohibited, it is quite common for cigarettes to take on a monetary quality, and throughout history, gold has taken on this unofficial monetary function.
Standardized coinage
From early times, metals, where available, have usually been favored for use as proto-money over such commodities as cattle, cowry shells, or salt, because they are at once durable, portable, and easily divisible. The use of gold as proto-money has been traced back to the fourth millennium B.C. when the Egyptians used gold bars of a set weight as a medium of exchange, as the Sumerians earlier had done with silver bars. The first known ruler who officially set standards of weight and money was Pheidon . The first stamped money (having the mark of some authority in the form of a picture or words) can bee seen in the Bibliotheque Nationale of Paris. It is an electrum stater of a turtle coin, coined at Aegina island. This remarkable coin dates about 700 B.C.. Electrum cois were also introduced about 650 B.C. in Lydia.
Coinage was widely adopted across Ionia and mainland Greece during the 6th century B.C., eventually leading to the Athenian Empire's 5th century B.C., dominance of the region through their export of silver coinage, mined in southern Attica at Laurium and Thorikos. A major silver vein discovery at Laurium in 483 BC led to the huge expansion of the Athenian military fleet. Competing coinage standards at the time were maintained by Mytilene and Phokaia using coins of Electrum; Aegina used silver.
It was the discovery of the touchstone which led the way for metal-based commodity money and coinage. Any soft metal can be tested for purity on a touchstone, allowing one to quickly calculate the total content of a particular metal in a lump. Gold is a soft metal, which is also hard to come by, dense, and storable. As a result, monetary gold spread very quickly from Asia Minor, where it first gained wide usage, to the entire world.
Using such a system still required several steps and mathematical calculation. The touchstone allows one to estimate the amount of gold in an alloy, which is then multiplied by the weight to find the amount of gold alone in a lump.
To make this process easier, the concept of standard coinage was introduced. Coins were pre-weighed and pre-alloyed, so as long as the manufacturer was aware of the origin of the coin, no use of the touchstone was required. Coins were typically minted by governments in a carefully protected process, and then stamped with an emblem that guaranteed the weight and value of the metal. It was, however, extremely common for governments to assert the value of such money lay in its emblem and thus to subsequently debase the currency by lowering the content of valuable metal.
Although gold and silver were commonly used to mint coins, other metals could be used. For instance, Ancient Sparta minted coins from iron to discourage its citizens from engaging in foreign trade. In the early seventeenth century Sweden lacked more precious metal and so produced "plate money," which were large slabs of copper approximately 50 cm or more in length and width, appropriately stamped with indications of their value.
Metal based coins had the advantage of carrying their value within the coins themselves — on the other hand, they induced manipulations: the clipping of coins in the attempt to get and recycle the precious metal. A greater problem was the simultaneous co-existence of gold, silver and copper coins in Europe. English and Spanish traders valued gold coins more than silver coins, as many of their neighbors did, with the effect that the English gold-based guinea coin began to rise against the English silver based crown in the 1670s and 1680s. Consequently, silver was ultimately pulled out of England for dubious amounts of gold coming into the country at a rate no other European nation would share. The effect was worsened with Asian traders not sharing the European appreciation of gold altogether — gold left Asia and silver left Europe in quantities European observers like Isaac Newton, Master of the Royal Mint observed with unease.
Stability came into the system with national Banks guaranteeing to change money into gold at a promised rate; it did, however, not come easily. The Bank of England risked a national financial catastrophe in the 1730s when customers demanded their money be changed into gold in a moment of crisis. Eventually London's merchants saved the bank and the nation wi
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