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The History of Money Sumer developed a large scale economy based on commodity money, while the Babylonians and their neighboring city states later developed the earliest system of economics as we think of, in terms of rules on debt... legal contracts and law codes relating to business practices, and private property.[1]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).[2]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.The use of proto-money, may date back to at least 100,000 years ago. Trading in red ochre is attested in Swaziland. |
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jewellery in the form of strung beads also dates back to this period,[3]
and had the basic attributes needed of early money, such as being scarce
in inland areas, and not easily counterfeited. Also they were 'worked'
to be made into something using a technique... or workmanship, into an
attractive object, that may have been considered then, valuable.In cultures
where metal working was unknown, shell or ivory jewellery were the most
divisible, easily storeable and transportable, scarce, and hard to counterfeit
objects that could be made. It is highly unlikely that there were formal
markets in 100,000 B.P. (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,
all of these transactions suffer from the basic problem of barter —
they require an improbable coincidence of wants or events. Overcoming
this without money requires some system of in-kind "credit"
or "gift exchange", restricting trade to those who know one
another. |
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