History of Money
- 36 minutes ago
- 4 min read
For most of human history, money & currency were transacted through memory. Long before coins, before kings, before banks, people kept track of who owed what to whom, in their heads, and in their relationships (in the form of favours, not coins). Can you imagine a society who is constantly helping each other, because helping and giving favours is the exact form of currency that people transact with? Sounds perfect, and anthropologists who study the earliest economies have found something that surprises people: credit came first. The debt existed before the coin did. For example, a person remembered that you helped with their harvest, and that memory was a kind of wealth. You could call it in later. The whole village ran on a vast, invisible web of remembered obligation. Money was the bookkeeping of trust, and when physical money did arrive, it was often something beautiful and strange. Cowrie shells, which are small and glossy and white, were used as currency across Africa, Asia, and the Pacific for thousands of years. One of the longest-lived currencies in human history was a seashell. People held the ocean in their hands and it was beautiful enough to carry value. The first true coins came from a kingdom called Lydia, in what is now Turkey, around 600 BC. They were made of electrum, a natural blend of gold and silver, and they were stamped with the mark of the king. That stamp is the important part. The metal had worth, yes, but the stamp said: a power vouches for this. From the very beginning, money carried a face. A ruler. A god. Authority pressed into the surface so that holding the coin meant holding a small piece of the kingdom.