Silver by weight as money standard
Plata pesada como patrón de valor y dinero
- Date
- c. 2500 BCE · confidence medium
- Place
- Ur, Ebla and Kanesh (Kültepe), Mesopotamia / Syria / Anatolia
- Credited to
- Sumerians and Akkadians; Assyrian merchants of Kanesh
- Field
- Communication
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What it is
Use of silver in rings, coils and weighed pieces (hacksilber) as a unit of account and means of payment, with prices fixed in silver shekels and interest rates of 20%. It is money without struck coinage, 1,800 years before Lydia.
Barley remained a parallel standard for internal payments; in Egypt the standard was the copper deben and grain until a late period.
What it led to
- Prices, wages and fines expressed in a common unit, enabling economic calculation
- Commercial credit, bills of exchange and trading companies (Assyrian colonies of Kanesh, c. 1900 BCE)
- Debt, compound interest and periodic royal edicts cancelling debts
- Long-distance trade in tin and textiles with private capital
Built on
- Accounting ledgers and balancesc. 3100 BCE
- Standardized weights and measuresc. 2600 BCE
- Silver metallurgy (cupellation)
Made possible
- Vase of Entemenac. 2400 BCE
- Written law codec. 2100 BCE
- Oxhide copper ingotc. 1400 BCE
- Coinage (Lydian electrum coins)c. 620 BCE
- Minted coinage (Lydia)
- Interest-bearing loan
- Commercial contract
- Temple banking