WHICH CAME FIRST: DEBT OR MONEY?

The other day I was reading Monica L. Smith's Cities: The First 6,000 Years. Dr. Smith is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA, and director of the South Asian Archaeology Laboratory at the university's Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. Her book is, as Science magazine puts it,a compelling journey from city life in ancient urban centers to the present and beyond.

In a section titledWhere Did All the Money Go? Smith delves into the history of economics.We might think that coinage came first and that abstract debt instruments such as bills of lading and credits cards and bank loans came later, she writes.But it's actually the reverse, because the idea of debt and repayment was in existence long before the development of coined money. Reciprocity, at first sealed with words and a handshake, later was put down in writing and then in durable physical symbols of value, such as coins and paper currency.

Smith discusses the development of cash in Europe and Asia, its spread throughout networks of urbanism (like ports and trade routes), its use in commerce, its propaganda value, and other aspects of coins in particular. She lays out some interesting ways coins made new opportunities not just for merchants and priests, for example, but also for beggars, with panhandling asa job option and economic niche within the urban realm. She describes coinage as revolutionary—After it was invented, it became a concept and a substance that people couldn't live without, like writing, clocks, and, as we can now add, broadband internet.

It was delightful to find this exploration of coins in an otherwise non-numismatic book.

To read the complete article, see:
Notes Published: Finding coins in a book about cities (https://news.coinupdate.com/notes-published-finding-coins-in-a-book-about-cities/)

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