Era 01 · ~9000 BC — ~600 BC

Barter & Commodity Money

What backs it

Backed by another good

Pulse cycle

4.5s

For most of human history there was no money, only exchange. Grain for tools, cattle for labor, shells for both. Commodity money emerged when a few goods — cowrie shells, cattle, barley, salt — became widely enough accepted to act as intermediaries between trades. They were expensive to forge, useful to hold, and recognizable across cultures.

Events in this era

~9000 BC

Livestock as currency

Cattle, sheep, and camels served as units of account across Mesopotamia and the Levant. Dowries, fines, bride prices, and taxes were paid in living animals. Hittite law codes from the second millennium BC set exact penalties: 30 sheep for killing a free man's horse, five shekels of silver equivalent for a lost ox. The Latin word 'pecunia', meaning money, derives from 'pecus', cattle. The English word 'fee' traces back to Old English 'feoh', also meaning cattle.

First accepted store of value at scale

~1800 BC

Cowrie shells in China and Africa

Cowrie shells from the Maldives became the dominant small-denomination currency across a trade belt running from Shang dynasty China through the Indian Ocean into West Africa. Shang burial sites contain strings of cowries placed alongside nobles. In the kingdom of Dahomey, 40 shells equaled one 'tokkou', 50 tokkou one 'galinhas', and taxes were counted by the sack. Their use outlasted the Shang, the Zhou, the Mali Empire, and nearly all the coinage that came afterward.

World's longest-running currency — ~3,500 years

~3000 BC

The Sumerian shekel

Mesopotamian accounting tablets recorded quantities of grain, silver, and labor in standardized units called shekels. One shekel was roughly 8.3 grams of silver, or its equivalent in barley. The shekel was not a physical coin. It was a unit of weight used to measure value inside temple and state records. Taxes, wages, and temple offerings were all denominated in it.

Writing and accounting co-evolved into one system

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Coined Metal

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