Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece
Mesopotamia and Egypt
The history of money begins with ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. About 250 BC, coinage in gold, silver
and bronze was the most widespread form of money throughout most of the
Mediterranean world, the Near East and India. While coinage only makes its
earliest appearance in the late seventh century BC, the tradition of using
precious metals, and especially silver, as money takes us back as far as the
twenty-fourth century BC in Mesopotamia.
The transaction envisaged in the passage of Genesis, an amount
of silver in exchange for a slave, is quite plausible for the historical period in
which the biblical story of Joseph is supposed to have been set (early second
millennium BC), but with one vital qualification. The seventeenth-century
English translators of the text wrongly thought that this passage referred to coins
('pieces of silver'). The most important point to remember about the monetary
use of metals in Mesopotamia and Egypt is that they passed as bullion by weight
and not as coins, and that consequently the value of the metal to be used in a
payment would have been assessed on a pair of scales on each separate occasion.
It is also important to place the occurrence of monetary phenomena within the
overall context of ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian economic life, which is
generally thought to have been typified by a system called 'centralized
redistribution', a technical term describing the primary process whereby goods were
distributed among the population. This was not done through the action of the
market; rather, manufactured goods and agricultural produce seem to have been
collected from the people by the authorities, kings and temples, and then
redistributed among them according to status and occupation.
Despite the dominance of central power in articulating much of what we
would describe as economic life in these ancient societies, silver was
recognizably used as money in a number of ways. Several early texts documenting the
principles of law and justice in Mesopotamia are preserved on clay tablets and
stone inscriptions from the royal and temple archives and monuments of the
cities in the region. They provide us with some evidence of the social
framework within which precious metal was used as money. In the 'law codes'
(which were proclamations of the role of the king in establishing justice rather
than legal codes of practice) a wide range of payments is documented in terms
of fixed amounts of weighed silver. Some codes also identify the king as the
authority for establishing the standard weights, and some surviving weights also
bear the name of the king as testimony to this. Fines for harming another's
person or property were usually reckoned in silver. For instance, according to the
law code of the king of Eshnunna in northern Mesopotamia (beginning of the
second millennium BC), the fine for biting a man's nose was 1 mina of silver
(about half a kilo), a significant amount, while a slap in the face was reckoned
at 10 shekels, a sixth as much. The same law code also sets out an ideal price list
of common goods, as an expression of the benefits of prosperity brought about
by royal justice, listing nine different commodities by weight and
that should be worth one shekel of silver. Interest rates,
figure in these quasi-legal texts. Both the Eshnunna code and the more famous Code of Hammurabi
of about two centuries later mention an interest rate on loans in
silver at 20 per cent. They also show that debts could
be paid off in grain with interest according to a silver grain rate, if the debtor had no silver. Grain by volume
seems in appropriate circumstances to have performed
monetary functions -for payments to agricultural workers, for instance. The Eshnunna law code
quantifies the ideal daily wage of a harvester in both grain
and silver (12 se, about half a gram). Grain is also used in these texts to express the value of foodstuffs,
whereas silver is used to express the value of a wider range of goods, from metals to oil and from lard
to wool. From the same period, documents from the city of Ur in southern Mesopotamia containing the
balanced accounts of merchants demonstrate that the representation of the monetary use of silver and
grain in the law codes largely reflects everyday practice. Many such texts show that silver by weight was
used as a standard means of accounting for the value of different goods, and that silver itself was often
used as a means of payment in commercial transactions, together with barley.
How did this silver standard work? When the metal itself was paid from one party to another for
whatever purpose, silver was weighed out on a balance according to the amount determined by law in
the payment of a fine, say, or the sum agreed by the
parties to a transaction. Hoards of silver found by archaeologists in Mesopotamia
and Iran suggest that the metal was made into large ingots, cut into small scraps
or drawn out into thin wire in order to facilitate the correct weighing out of the
silver in bullion form. The silver wire was also made into rings which,
documentary evidence suggests, were sometimes made to a certain weight.
In Mesopotamian cities, temples played a central role in what we might call
the monetary sphere. They were probably the guardians of the official weights,
and were generally important in the regulation of the silver system. As
prestigious and literate institutions and wealthy repositories of silver and gold,
temples were also the centers where records of payments and loans were made and
kept. A document dated to 1823 BC records a loan
from the temple of the god Shamash in the city of Sippar.
Silver itself, then, was commonly used as a monetary medium in ancient
Mesopotamia. The king and the temples established the weight standards and
published in inscriptions the values of certain commodities in silver (though it
is uncertain how far this should be understood as representing official
price-fixing) as well as the amounts of silver to be paid according to law in a range of
circumstances -fines, interest, wages, and so on. But these authorities did not
concern themselves further with the public supply of silver. It seems that the
monetary 'circulation' of silver bullion was a social custom regulated to some
extent by king and temple, but not directly administered by them. The metal
had to be imported into the region from surrounding areas, and much of it
would have been consumed - in effect hoarded -by kings, aristocrats and
temples through taxes, tributes and plunder. As such, silver was a highly valued
substance with strong symbolic associations with royalty, wealth and power, and
the substantial surplus that was not immobilised in treasuries was potentially available for monetary use.
Similarly deprived of local sources of silver, ancient Egypt was, however, rich in
gold from Nubia and in the agricultural wealth resulting from the yearly
flooding of the Nile. In a letter to King Amenhotep III (now in the British Museum),
Tushatta, King of Mitanni (c. 1390-1352 BC), says that in Egypt 'gold was more
common than dust'. There is frequent mention in texts from the later New
Kingdom (c. 1295-1069 BC) of standard weights (the deben of 91 grams, and its
tenth, the kite), according to which metals were used as money in much the same
ways as in Mesopotamia -both as a direct means of payment and in accounting
for value across a range of goods in transactions by barter. A document
preserved from the New Kingdom period records how a policeman, Amunmes,
bought an ox valued at 50 deben of copper (about 4.55 kg) from a workman,
Penamun, but only 5 deben were actually paid in copper. The balance was made up by a
variety of other commodities whose values were also expressed in deben of copper -fat
(30 deben), oil (5 deben) and clothing (10 deben). This text comes from the village of
Deir el-Medina near the city of Thebes, inhabited by the skilled craftsmen who
worked on the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings. A large number of such
documents have survived from this highly literate community, which show that buying
and selling on this system were frequent and that silver was a commonly used metal to
express units of value in payments. Indeed, the Egyptian word for silver (hedj) seems
to have taken on a broader meaning approaching that of money. This can be seen in a document from Deir el-Medina
which records the repayment of a loan of ,"silver' (in other words, money) to the
sum of 76 deben of copper by one Shedydemduat to a workman named Pennuit.
Fifty-four deben had already been repaid, and the remainder still to be returned
was therefore 22 deben, in order to complete the amount of "silver" '.
Though the amounts are expressed in terms of copper deben, the payments
could in fact have been made in a variety of goods. But silver, when available,
was clearly highly acceptable as a means of payment, and hoards of gold and
silver bullion have been found in Egypt. One such hoard, found during excavations
in el-Amarna, the city of King Akhenaten (c. 1352-1336 BC), part of which
is in the British Museum, contained both gold and silver ingots and pieces of
cut silver, much of which is in rings, and a small silver figurine. The weights of
some of the individual ingots of gold and silver seem to approximate to
multiples and fractions of the deben. The hoard as a whole illustrates the forms in
which assorted fragments of precious metal were weighed out and passed from
hand to hand in Egypt within a system which commonly used the value of precious metal in payments.
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