What Was Money Before Coins

Livestock is the oldest measure of value. The Latin pecunia, "money," comes from pecus, "cattle": counting in cattle was common long before minting. In Mesopotamia, accounts were kept in barley and silver, and scribes recorded on clay tablets who owed what to whom. A debt like this could last for years, without anything changing hands at all.

Cowrie shells circulated in China, India, and Africa: they are hard to counterfeit and do not spoil. The Chinese character for "shell" is still part of characters connected with wealth and trade. Cloth, grain, and metal in ingots and scraps worked differently - they were weighed in every transaction. Shekel, mina, and talent were originally units of weight, not names of coins.

Historians rarely find pure "thing-for-thing" exchange in living societies: within a community, it is easier to record a debt than to match up what people want. The debate is still ongoing. But barter did happen with outsiders - and it ran into the same wall.

For something to become money, it has to pass four tests: almost everyone wants it, it does not spoil, it can be divided or counted in units, and it cannot be quickly made. Livestock fails on divisibility: you cannot hand over half a bull. Grain spoils and takes up space. Shells work fine until someone brings them in sacks from the coast. Metal passes them all.

Metal by weight had one remaining hassle: every transaction required weighing it and checking for impurities. Coins solved exactly that. The first known coins were minted in Lydia, in Asia Minor, around the 7th century BCE, from electrum - a natural alloy of gold and silver. The stamp meant the minter had confirmed the weight and quality, so there was no need to get out the scales. Numismatists still debate how consistent the composition of the earliest coins was.