"The bodies belonged to a woman, aged between 35 and 50, who was clutching jewellery and coins"
Funny to see that some things never change. You're about to get vaporized by a pyroclastic avalanche and your first thought is to grab your bling.
Funny to see that some things never change. You're about to get vaporized by a pyroclastic avalanche and your first thought is to grab your bling.
"italia-south-1 was hit by a volcano yesterday, we are failing over to dalmatia-west-1 until issues are resolved. There may be some latency with obtaining coins today."
The modern form of banking is rooted in 14th century Italy (Medici and so on) [1].
Bronze age civilizations had money. Coins as we think of them became widespread in the iron age. Shekels, for instance, go back much further.
The Roman empire was thoroughly monetized.
The relevant event took place in 79 AD, long after the end of the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean.
You can definitely have organized society without banking, but AFAIK there was no organized society without some form of taxation, and few organized societies without long-distance trade (only in isolated places).
From the Code of Hammurabi (~1750BCE):
> If a man rents a boat of 60-[kur] capacity, he shall give one-sixth [of a shekel] of silver per day as its hire.
At this point, a shekel is a unit of weight, not a coin, but is already being used as, effectively, money. Coins were initially more a convenience thing than anything else.
Primitive banking-type activity is also showing up in this time period; institutions, mostly temples, taking deposits and lending with interest. And really, for most of the world (Ancient India did have some _slightly_ more sophisticated bank-like behaviour), that’s more or less where it stayed til the 17th century or so.
There is ample written evidence that Bronze Age civilizations had money and here's just one example.
Ea-nāṣir!!!!!
https://www.archaeform.de/wordpress/blog/2016/03/30/worlds-o...
There is simply nothing among the finds that could be money, and contracts seem to be in the form of I gave you 18 measures of wheat for three fat sheep. You gave me 7 jugs of oil, and I will make you 8 pairs of sandals" (all numbers and everything made up right now)
He asserts multiple times the existence of banks, money lenders, and multiple written records of persons demanding payment of money in his book Letters from Mesopotamia, Official, Business, and Private Letters on Clay Tablets from Two Millennia: https://isac.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/uploads/shared...
Do you have an alternate translation?
We underestimate just how much of a burden on arithmetics the previous systems were. Too unwieldy.
On a similar note, I believe that for the same reason, the Chinese language will never achieve mass adoption in the rest of the world. The script is too complicated and reaching effective literacy takes much longer than with Latin characters.
It is a difference similar to the one between a horse and a car.
So they did not really have place value system. Or at least logical leap from abacus to place value. Instead they had 1, 5, 10, 50, 100, 500, 1000 and summed or deducted these. Sometimes in stylistic ways.
If I ever die, I hope it's after I'm long gone...
However, even in the modern era, somebody with a "bug out bag" or a "Wake Up, Stuffs Happening (WUSH) bag" still includes "cash" as one of the main includes in the top priorities [1]
[1] Basic 72-Hour Bug Out Bag List, https://www.bugoutbagbuilder.com/learning-tutorials/bug-out-...