History of money: Real Research!

I have bought to books on the history of money. The one I have started to read seems to be the book that I would want to write myself which is both fortunate and unfortunate as it goes. It is called (crazy enough) Money, a History edited by Johnathan Williams. While it reads like a text book if you are at all interested in the subject it is proving to be a valuable read.

My research is fueled by my need to know when money became so important. As a species humans became sedentary as a means of easing the struggles of providing for ones own health and well being. As our cultures became more complex we learned to specialize in things. With this specialization came surplus which could be traded for things other people specialized in. The point to note here is that each persons specialization had something to do with survival.
At some point money became everyones specialization, to the point where most of us have nothing to do with our own survival. All we need is money. I am not anti-money or anti-technology, I am just fascinated by this phenomenon.

With that:

Money as a concept emerged in the third millennium BCE in Mesopotamia. At this point in the history of human culture most societies worked with an economic system of 'centralized redistribution' in which all the resources amassed by a society were given to that societies authorities and then redistributed among the public (minus tribute, one can assume). Outside of these agricultural/textile goods, silver (as well as other precious metals) was regarded as a very valuable thing. So valuable in fact that its exact value was determined by the authorities of ones society. These standardized weights were kept in sacred places. A sheqel for instance was not a coin but a standardized amount of silver. Each society had a standard weight of silver used as a monetary standard and early societies used this silver standard as a means of calculating interest on loans, determining fines, and assessing value of other non-silver things. So we can see that as soon as we become a stationary people and amass a surplus we began to assess and compare that surplus to silver. How much we humans love our shiny things...

Most of the silver any given community or society had was owned by kings and temples. That being said, not all transactions were dealt with in silver, in fact most were not. As the aristocracy be it theistic or royal had most of the silver, they were the ones who would deal in silver. While a man might know or count how much his millet he had harvested was worth in silver, that standard was used as a means of calculating barter. I have two bundles of millet which is worth a gram of silver, a gram of silver is worth a goat, therefore: two bundles of millet is equal in . worth to a goat. It is amazing that this early in our evolution as a thinking creature we developed an extraction of a things worth. Why would not two bundles of millet just be equal in worth to a goat?

The first coins emerge in the kingdom of Lydia. With the development of the minting of coins, the necessity of stamping them followed so as to identify where the coin had been made. It is important to note that at this time coins were very valuable; even the smallest coin was much to valuable to use on an everyday basis and there is debate about how much these early coins were circulated. In effect the smallest coin would be worth (picking a denomination at random to prove a point) 500 of our contemporary U.S. dollars.

With the advent of coins we start to see an unusual phenomenon. As coins become more and more popular as a means of commerce, the value of a coin starts to separate itself from the worth of the amount of precious metal from which it was made. We also see coins from the community you are living in be worth more than coins acquired from other societies.

More to come...