The history of money is replete with imaginative mandates. Before money, people relied on bartering — an inconvenient system because it requires a “double coincidence of wants.” Instead many cultures developed ritual ways to exchange items of value — in marriage, or to pay penance for killing someone, or in sacrifices. Items used for these exchanges varied from cowry shells to cattle, sperm whale teeth and long-tusked pigs.
Commodities like these helped fulfill two central functions of money:
Served as a unit of account (offering a standardised way to measure worth)
Acted as a store of #value (things you can accumulate now and use later)
Due to the flaws of the barter system, these goods didn’t serve the third function of money:
Act as a medium of exchange, a neutral resource that can easily be transferred for goods.
Money that served all three of these functions wasn’t created until around 600 B.C.E. when Lydia, a kingdom in modern-day Turkey, created what many historians consider the first coins: lumps of blended gold and silver stamped with a lion. The idea spread to Greece, where people started exchanging their goods for coins in public spaces called agoras. Money soon created alternatives to traditional labor systems. Now, instead of working on a wealthy landowner’s farm for a year in.../"
fkamiah17