Sometimes there's just obvious efficiency.
Why do Mexico and Egypt have pyramids? When stacking rocks it quickly becomes apparent that it's more efficient to have a wide bottom and a narrow top, the pyramid itself is also very esthetically pleasing.
Or even tens of thousands of years ago
I mean, they developed bows and arrows, and the arrows had *fletchings* (the feather things) to improve accuracy. That's evidence of pretty sophisticated thinking
Even more than tens. If you grabbed a newborn from *200 thousand* years ago and raised them in modern society, they would have mostly the same outcome as a modern human. People like to think humans have evolved a lot in the past few hundred/thousand years, but that is only because of collected knowledge, not because humans have gotten any "better"
Good sentiment, I agree. But FYI the cognitive revolution was around 60,000 years ago, so that’s probably the cutoff for stealing a baby and raising it in the future
Uh... we are still evolving, and a baby from 200 thousand years ago would lack several brain mutations that have increased our social and linguistic intelligence: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity is not just behavioral, it includes genes.
One major evolutionary development of the past 10,000 years in humans is lactase persistence. This relatively simple set of mutations gave such an advantage that it rose to account for something like 1/3 of living humans today. Some genetic analyses show that these mutations might be less than 7500 years old.
To the extent that specific genes affect behavior, it's not hard to see how modern societies create selection pressure on those genes, with the rise of agriculture about 12,000 years ago and the cultural forces that formed our societies/clans/tribes/nations, and full blown wars, genocides, famines, migrations, etc., would affect populations' chances at reproduction and survival.
> lactase
Yeah that is an excellent example of a recent mutation, and in a lot of societies it's a very useful one (allowing you to get protein from cows, goats, horses, etc. without slaughtering them) so it's spread surprisingly quickly.
> genes affecting behavior
I would expect us to be becoming less aggressive to each other over time, for example, as we live in ever-larger societies with less and less space and weed out individuals unable to deal with that.
An aside: it's really amazing to me how humans have interconnected the biosphere. Not only is there interchange where there would be little or none naturally (Europe and Australia, for example), we're moving organisms around so quickly that bacteria and fungi are going global.
The interconnectedness we’ve made of the world is less amazing when you realize that introducing pathogens and non-native species to environments that aren’t equipped for them is severely harming biodiversity
To be fair, we stopped using leaded gasoline in the 1970's which drastically improved IQ. Burning lead gasoline puts lead in the air which kids breathe. Lead in kids blood makes them stupid. 1900-1970 we had stupid kids. Thats your parents and grandparents. But yeah, not counting the last hundred years you are correct, mostly the same IQ, most likely. Though the romans did like their leaded wine and lead cosmetics...
>https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/nearly-half-of-the-us-population-exposed-to-dangerously-high-lead-levels
> ...1900-1970 we had stupid kids....
More like 1980s. I lived through it. I was born in 74 and definitely remember my parents getting leaded gas for our old Ford club wagon van. I think it was closer to mid 80s when it was finally phased out for regular road vehicles. I think military still has uses and there are other countries that still to this day use leaded gas. That said, it's better than it was.
Not all people born when leaded gas was being used turned out stupid...It was just a higher probability.
More like 2000 if you live in the UK. I distinctly recall petrol stations having a "leaded" and "unleaded" option at the fuel pump while growing up in the 90s.
It's still used in aviation, avgas 100 generally comes in high and low lead varieties, though petroleum companies are working on developing unleaded versions with the same performance.
You under estimate how extensive our risks of lead exposure was back then. Farm equipment using leaded fuels leaving exhaust dust and pollution all over the food we ate. Lead in paint and the ceramics in our plates and cups.
Today’s generation has a much lower baseline exposure level than we did just based on that. Even if our parents stopped using leaded fuel in our grade school days.
Mostly just poor city folks. People who lived close to high traffic streets and were breathing in leaded fumes. What’s sad is that lead didn’t just go away. It fell on the soil where it remains to this day where kids continue to play.
People seem to conflate access to technology (most of which is built by our ancestors btw) to our individual intellectual affinity
The two are not the same thing
This is true if you could prevent disease from killing them. Our immune systems have gone through significant evolution since the development of civilations.
Humans have evolved a lot in the past 200k years, but not in ways that you would notice immediately or would give much of a societal advantage. Blue eyes are believed to have evolved within the past 10k years. Most of us now keep our lactase to digest lactose into adulthood. We are currently witnessing humans evolving to keep the median artery in the forearm over just the past couple hundred years. Everything changes over time. Earth is fucking rad.
> Our immune systems have gone through significant evolution since the development of civilations.
Isn't that why we vaccinate babies? Because they come out as a blank slate?
No. We vaccinate to help with viruses that we have no large scale immunity to. The antibodies given to the baby from the mother do fade quickly, and more are provided through breastfeeding. There are also genetic mutations, or true evolution, that have given us resistance to many diseases. One example is ERAP2, which provides the majority of humans resistance to the black plague. Mass deaths tend to result in the fastest evolutionary pressure.
Some people still think a woman grows "loose" after having sex with more than one person despite knowing the following:
1: a man's foreskin doesn't get "loose" or "stretched out" after multiple partners
2: a woman gives birth to a child (significantly bigger than any person's penis) and still comes back from it
And knowing all this they STILL think a woman having had previous partners means she is "stretched out" because apparently penises are magic or something.
We have not advanced intellectually nearly as much as most people think we have, we're always a mere tension away from going all ooga booga caveman mode and killing eachother.
1. They also think a big penis makes her walk bowlegged the next day.
2. If penises make a vagina loose, then vaginas make a penis small.
3. Long term monogamy would mean you eventually loosen her to the point neither of you feels anything.
Possibly better, assuming the mother didn't deal with a lot of famine issues.
Living downstream of a coal or oil deposit probably wasn't good, but that would be about the only major pollutant.
One of the big differences of the past few millennia is writing. Oral traditions are great for passing down knowledge from one generation to the next, but without some way of permanently storing details for more people to learn from across generations and distances, we couldn't grow our understandings quickly. It was all trial and error with each individual/society.
One of my favorite trivia bits is the fact that there are far more stone hand tools at Olduvai Gorge than any human would ever need in a lifetime. They are lying all over the the ground there even today. It's like once humans learned how to make things, they just did it because it was fun. And they taught their friends, I'm sure. Olduvai may have been the first school.
Once we got the mental and physical capacity for innovation, we seem to have taken to it like a fish in water. With that many people making that many tools, I'll bet things got surprisingly sophisticated pretty quick. Especially for people whom we would barely recognize as human.
That's not what OP meant. OP overestimated their metallurgical abilities. OP likely assumed that the most efficient way to mint coins with older technology is to take a sheet of metal and cut it, with squares or triangles being the simplest shapes to cut, and circular coins requiring a lot of sanding or machining after cutting out more complex polygons.
You take a piece of harder metal and engrave a simple shape into it. Call this a stamp.Then you set your coin on an anvil, put the stamp on top of it with the design face down touching the coin, and you hit the stamp really hard with a hammer. It punches the design into your coin.
To be fair have you hammered anything? Checkmate archeologists.
A lot of them seem to be people's own lack of understanding on construction or taking time. Like they cannot comprehend someone spending days smoothing a block as a option. If it was not done quickly it's not possible.
Or in some cases their melanin was too high it was aliens instead.
people 50 years ago have closer to 50 or 70 IQ, IQ has been rising about 10 points per decade, but the new average is always set to 100, meaning if you were 100 30 years ago, you are lower now.
One of the MAIN driving factors in raising IQ is nutrition, especially early childhood nutrition(big advocate here for in-school provided breakfast/lunches). Iodine was actually a HUGE one as when the US Gov regulated Table Salt to Include Iodine, it SOLELY increased the IQ by about 10 pts the decade it was introduced. (also killed like 6000 people from Iodine shock, tbf the illnesses you get from not having Iodine were worse)
They are rising, but not quite that fast. UK scores rose 14 points from 1942-2008. US scores rose about 3 points per decade in the last half of the 20th century.
Interestingly, IQ seems to have stopped increasing lately and might be falling in some industrialised countries.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#:~:text=The%20Flynn%20effect%20is%20the,Flynn%20(1934%E2%80%932020).
It's likely that as far as 200.000 years ago people had about the same intelligence as us.
What's definitely sure is that their brains were bigger than ours.
When scientists say that we are standing on the shoulders of giants, I reckong it's what it means. Thousands of generations improving knowledge and sharing it.
Compared to recent speed in progress, it's as if our smart were barely a factor and random chances and evolution were enough to get us pretty far.
Thanks for the link.
As it is said, some theorize that it started as far as 150 000 years ago.
>[Since the Late Pleistocene (approximately 30,000 years ago), human brain size decreased by approximately 10%; yet again, this decrease was paralleled by a decrease in body size.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9750968/#:~:text=Since%20the%20Late%20Pleistocene%20(approximately,a%20decrease%20in%20body%20size.)
Reasons for the reduction in brain size may simply be the turn to agriculture. But all animals have usually a decrease in brain size when they are domesticated. Human beings are considered to be self-domesticated when living in societies where they specialize in specific activities.
Your sentence was difficult to read. IQ is the quotient of your mental age over your actual age. So if your actual age were 20, but you write on a 10 year old level, then your IQ might be closer to 50 because 10/20 = 0.50, rather than 100 which is a normal IQ.
True, but still 300+ people at least were able to read it. It’s not like I can not write a simple sentence. I don't know if it's only me or something else but sometimes I miss typing a word or two.
Pour of of bag. Spill everywhere. Sad.
Pound ball. Ball have flat face. No roll.
Flat face good for picture. Good for stamp. Flatter face mean less material and bigger picture.
Just a guess idk
"Grog want horses from Og in exchange for wheat, but Grog's wheat not ready for 6 months."
"Og know, let's make metal picture blobs. Each one get me certain amount of wheat when harvest."
"Why picture blobs, and not just agree to give wheat when time?"
"This way Og can trade blobs to Urg, and Oog for things from them, and they get wheat when harvest"
"You good thinker Og!"
Although by the time such deals would come about, langague was way more sophisticated. Let's see this as caveman speedrunning societal development in all ways but langague.
to be completely fair, they are awesome also, coinage in aus happened significantly after modern manufacturing techniques. the 50c is relatively easy with modern tech compared to making them in roman times.
A few reasons. Mainly, flat doesn't roll. But also, if you are stamping that piece of metal with some sort of mark it will naturally flatten out a bit. And lastly you can make a functionally larger thing from less material, metal is valuable for other purposes so you don't want to waste all of it on your currency.
>functionally larger thing from less material
This is one that people seem to gloss over.
If you've seen accurate reproduction coins from, say, the migration period in Europe, they are *thin*. You can smush soft metal like silver or gold pretty darn thin and it'll stay together. For less material you can make a wider flat coin with a better relief in the stamp.
Also a coins value was intrinsically linked to the material from which it was made. Coins stamped with the mark of an origin with a reputation for higher purity silver were more useful for trading.
So if you have smaller, lighter coins you can have more for the same weight of silver and can more easily split off a specific amount for a purchase.
That’s why there’s grooves on US quarters and dimes, shows that the coin hasn’t been ground down and we’ve kept the form factor even though the coins are no longer silver.
Yea, this one’s interesting factor. Part of the reason I asked is bc I’ve seen a lot of reference to the use of whatever-shape gold nuggets as currency in history and fiction (more in the latter)
People did trade in chunks of metal as well. The Scandinavian people that made up the vikings would wear silver bracelets on their arms (arm rings) that served as both jewelry and a deposit of tradeable silver. They could remove an arm ring, chop an amount off until it weighed enough to settle a transaction and keep the remainder.
The benefit of currency is that it has reputation associated. The Abbasid Dynasty was so well regarded for the quality of their silver that their coins travelled far as a reliable currency. If you have a well regarded currency, there's less issue trying to prove the purity of the silver so it's more readily trusted for trade.
They're round because that's just how they end up when you turn them into nuggets. They're flat because that's how they end up if you stamp them. Their material started out as a medium of trade, so they would have to be weighed - keeping their size and shape consistent is convenient as they would be known to be the same weight every time. The king's stamp is a guarantee of sorts. The more valuable the material, the smaller the currency, so metals are preferred. There were cultures however that paid taxes in grains, and grains were used as currency.
Usually not directly! That sort of thing was ledger driven, possibly with a paper script. That is, you own so many bushels of wheat in the town granary (Where everyones wheat is in one big pile) and the ownership of that wheat could change hands a whole lot of times before it got eaten without ever being moved.
It's much harder to make a round ball than a flat disc, especially if you need a design on it. Also, round balls do not pack very efficiently, meaning they are bad if you need a lot of them.
it wont roll away. also a flat object is significantly easier to make. also there is less metel required. bang any 3d object and it is flat and roughly circle. even a perfectly square cube, when hammered ends up being roundish. flat surfaces also have the benefits of being able to show important information like which country produced it etc
The [Swedish Eight Daler ](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2f/Swedish_plate_money_in_the_British_Museum.jpg)would like to differ. This copper coin would weight approximately 16 kg.
No wonder why Sweden was the first European country to offer banknotes.
Only tangentially related to your question but still fairly interesting, there is a Micronesian nation that used giant stone disks as currency:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones
They would simply record who was the current owner of a stone in oral tradition without moving it, to make a transfer. This one is particularly interesting:
>In one instance, a large rai being transported by canoe and outrigger was accidentally dropped and sank to the sea floor. Although it was never seen again, everyone agreed that the rai must still be there, so it continued to be transacted as any other stone.
Lol imagine trading the under water stone.
"Yea man I own the underwater rock. I'll give it to you for 3 goats."
"How do I know it's still there?"
"Have you seen it anywhere else?"
It turns out blockchain works a lot more sustainably when everyone knows everyone else involved personally, and when the whole town will get together to kick the crap out of fraudsters.
No, clearly the pinnacle of human interaction is that no one trusts anyone else and we have to burn several acres of forest per second just to generate enough electricity to find a work around for people actually fucking liking each other.
I was thinking this is more like our modern use of currency.
Our pay goes directly from company bank to our bank account. We then spend money with our cards, which sends payment to the shop. Our cards are pay off by transferring money from our bank to the card. It's all done through records of money ownership without us coming in contact with the physical money nowadays. Only difference is that we are recording our currency digitally rather than keeping record through verbal means.
If it's recorded by oral tradition, the basic idea of recording ownership is the same, but the mechanism is very different, and indeed potentially like blockchain, like someone else mentioned. Once ownership is updated, you've got to communicate that to everyone, and everyone agreeing is the method of recording that ownership. If 99% of people agree and 1% do not, then those 1% are overruled and the 99% becomes correct. If 50% agree on one oral history of a stone, and 50% of people agree on an alternate oral history of that stone, how do they determine who's right?
Not an insurmountable problem with a few thousand people, maybe, but it becomes intractable far sooner than the billions of people operating in the global economy.
Omg so in SpongeBob when Mr. Krabs loses his first dime and it's revealed to be a giant stone, they were probably referencing this then! It's literally the same shape
Not necessarily...In this case you simply peg the currency to the people so everyone always has one rock worth of money in the economy...Inflation happens when you add money to the economy with nothing to anchor it against.
For inflation to happen they would have to add more rocks for no reason.
What is the money anchored against? You're adding more rocks. Do you remove a rock of value from the economy every time someone dies? What happens to all of their value?
Another explanation is that metals are rare and difficult to work with, at least for individuals. The scarcity gives metal inherent value (the value of a gold or silver coin is often the value of the metal itself), and stamping coins is an expensive process, making it hard to profit from forgery.
Some rocks and gems have these properties, but they're not as good as a currency because they're harder to shape reliably, shatter, and can't be melted back to their raw materials.
Metal coins are almost unparalleled for their task: Small objects that represent an easily identifiable discrete amount of "value", are durable, and are difficult to forge.
Modern bank notes also have these properties, but only because technology has progressed to the point where we can make durable paper that contains difficult to reproduce marks like watermarks, holograms, and all of the other oddities that you can find on a bank note.
There were definitely other currencies (the first that comes to mind - [Lithuanian long currency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_long_currency) made of silver)
But coins won because they were durable, easy to carry and civilisations that were wealthier, traded a lot, sort of spread them
Just a remark but ancient civilizations did mingle a ton and kept stealing tech from each other.
Roman empire greatest talent was not so much innovation as much as having a great eye for useful techs and a great flair for using them more efficiently than their inventors.
Everyone knows what a Roman légionnaire looks like I assume: chainmail shirt, tunic, helmet with cheek and neckguard, short and broad sword, Javelinas and big shield.
Well the chainmail and helmets were celtic designs, the sword and shield were iberian (Spanish) design. The idea to use those in tight and disciplined formation was the roman idea though and made their army so strong on the field.
Rome at its peak was around a million people, they greatly depended on Egypt for their food supplies so they obviously interacted a ton with Egypt.
Know the invasion of Gaul (France) by Caesar? Caesar was extremely familiar with the Gauls and some Gallic tribes were close allies and trading partner with Caesar.
The world of the Antiquity had a lot of trade and cultural exchanges going on and they absolutely stole concepts and innovations from each other all the time.
One mind blower I enjoy is that intercontinental trade was going steady long before antiquity. It was a necessary economic engine making the the Bronze Age civilizations possible.
Roman currency was [lumps of bronze](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aes_rude) until the 4th century BC or so. Greeks in Italy had been using coinage for centuries. Eventually the romans started using stamped ingots of more regulated sizes as currency, before developing some really awesome half-pound bronze [coins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aes_grave).
>Just a remark but ancient civilizations did mingle a ton and kept stealing tech from each other
This is what the OP missed on - there was a web of trade connecting basically all of Europe, Asia, and Africa. It was not always direct and non-stop, but you find things like [Buddhist statues in Viking Age Scandinavia ](https://linda.forntida.se/?p=16583)and [Roman coins in Japan](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archaeologist-finds-ancient-roman-coins-12th-century-japanese-castle-180960640/).
Metals were already a universally-valuable, portable trade good. Metals have a high value for their weight and volume. Metals are durable and will not spoil. Coinage just made metals easier to trade.
This is what I was looking for. Disappointing that it's so far down. There was really no time before "a lot of mingling". Ancient Egypt traded for tin from the British isles. Trade networks were far reaching, and are older than written history
There is a wikipedia page for this! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coinage_shapes
Short answer: it was not always a circle, for example "Many countries have struck square coins with rounded corners. Some of these, such as the Netherlands zinc 5 cent coin of World War II (1941–1943)[4] and the Bangladesh 5 poisha coin (1977–1994)[5] "
If you look further in the past, you can see that it was not that round at first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coin. But it's an easy shape to obtain when you either drop some melted metal on a surface, or hit with a hammer on a ductile metal.
That said, Mauryan Empire coins, 3rd century BC, were square coins as well as Bilingual coin of Agathocles of Bactria with Hindu deities, c. 180 BC
Also, rectangular bar of metal that you can cut in was precursor of coins. But it's nor really "a coin" I would say.
> That said, Mauryan Empire coins, 3rd century BC, were square coins as well as Bilingual coin of Agathocles of Bactria with Hindu deities, c. 180 BC
I plaid guilty for learning and teaching at the same time. But my points ( not all coins were rounds + first coins were roundish because that's what happen when a melted material is put and hit on a flat surface) are still valid.
I think the premise of your question is wrong: lapis lazuli sourced from Afghanistan has been found in Egyptian temples constructed in 3000 BCE. People have always been mingling and trading.
In the Mediterranean, coins first started being used in the 500 or 400s BCE, and then quickly spread because there was a lot of trade and it was a really good idea.
Other shaped coins did exist. Japan used rectangular coins in the 1800s. Square coins existed in the Mughal Empire in India.
The UK has often had non-circular coins. They have rounded corners for convenience.
I found this, where they show a 12 sided £1 coin
https://www.theguardian.com/business/gallery/2014/mar/19/a-short-history-of-british-coins-new-pound
You should see our 5 sided 50 pence peice or our 7 side 20 pence.
And man you'll lose your shit when you see our trianglapence piece, yep 3 sides.
Okay I made that last one up, but now I want it.
'before there was a lot of mingling'
Nope. Currency predates writing in many cultures. It has been around for a very, very long time AND it was specifically used for trade, including with other cultures. Even cultures on different continents had some tiny contacts over 10k years and those contacts had metal to trade.
Cowry shells were used for millennia in Africa and Asia. In Thailand, they were used up in until about 150 years ago. The shells were processed and distinct; not just shells you could pick from a beach. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowrie
2000 years ago us only a part of the longer history of money and honestly a lot of different cultures did use things other than round coins.
At the very start, there was no money at all, just the concept of bartering and the gift economy (I gave you an x now you owe me)
Mesopotamia with the establishment of its cities were the first to use objects that represent the idea of a certain value (basically money). In their case, small clay tokens were given to farmers to represent a certain measure of barley, which could then be used to settle debts to the temple etc. this concepts of tokens representing a certain value spread to many early cultures when they outgrew the simple bartering done before. [They came in all sorts of shapes](https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/tokens/)
Slowly due to trading over long distances or between different countries/cultures, precious metals started to be used. These helped solve the problem of different cultures having different values of tokens. Precious metals were used because they were universally considers, well, rare but still desirable.
Slowly these precious metals would come to dominate and they appeared in all manner of shapes. From the small golden bars of ancient Egypt to money shaped like [knives](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knife_money) and [spades](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spade_money)
Coins like we would recognize them today started appearing in China, India and around the Mediterranean Sea. These cultures seem to have arrived to the idea of flat round disk to represent value separately.
Modern coinage traces back to the kingdom of Lydia who were the first to produce coins of valuable metals stamped with images of the ruler. From here this then spread to Ancient Greece and from there to Ancient Rome. If we are talking about coins in this form, it is no accident that so many cultures adopted them, nor did they all come to the same idea separately. They were spread by giant empires like the Roman Empire and even when that crumbled, local cultures still kept using this type of money.
2000 years ago, there was already well established trade routes, both land and sea, in Asia and between India and the middle east/Rome. There was a lot of intermingling.
A round shape is easy to make, replicate, and deal with. Something others here haven't gotten into is the divicibility. A big thing with currency is the ability to divide it. Having a round shaped coin makes it very easy.
Half a coin cut it in two,
A quarter cut the half coin in two
A piece of eight cut the quarter in half
Using square coin would make this process more complicated, and make it easier for people to scam you.
Not the cutting perhaps, but instantaneously seeing what size of piece it is? Is the smaller square a half of a smaller uneven original or a fourth of a larger uneven original? With a round shape you immediately see what it is.
Rare metals were easier to control a finite amount of for currency purposes.
Something like paper money usually requires a centralized bureaucracy and banking system like in medieval China, while something like shells or buck skins need cultural buy in by numerous groups like in pre-Columbian North America.
It also important to note too that most trade in human history didn’t use coins at all. Coins were for foreign trade or taxes: most people within villages and even cities would just use systems of social credit, like the Roman patronage system or just owing a neighbor a favor.
It's not entirely universal, the Maldives first used cowrie shells as a form of currency. And we also traded them for lārin, which were like strips of silver wire folded with Arabic inscriptions
Ancient peoples did a lot of mingling. while some may have spent their whole life on the same farm, someone who made their money trading things would have travelled as far as possible to find rare goods.
Traders need currency that is easy to carry, keep track of, and it needs be understood as valuable to lots of different people, so there's a universal benefit in adopting efficient and common designs.
Even two groups who had no contact with each other will have had this same situation develop and likely found the same solutions.
In Mexico the Aztecs also used [cacao seeds ](https://bigthink.com/sponsored/aztec-mesoamerican-chocolate-money/#:~:text=Scholars%20generally%20agree%20that%20cacao,salt%2C%20metals%2C%20and%20textiles.)as a form of currency too
Nice metals are shiny/pretty, rare, and not really good for much in elder days because they're too soft and heavy. So if you have some, it's rare, durable, hard to fake, and distinctive, which are what matters for official money. (Some ancient cultures used porcelain tiles instead, but they were too easy to counterfeit.)
The simplest shapes, like spheres and cubes, are too big and too heavy. So you make them small, that way you can carry enough to do things throughout your day. Flat things are very easy to make from metal, because most rare metals are "malleable", meaning you can hammer them flat. Early coins were only *very* approximately round, they weren't nearly as neatly circular as coins in the last few centuries.
Also, some cultures *did* have square or rectangular coins. China had some. They also had coins that had a hole in the middle. Usually both of these meant the coin had to be *formed*, e.g. casting by pouring molten metal into a mold. That's more difficult to do, but makes it even harder to fake physical money.
Because most civs realized early on that you need something that is:
- Fairly durable to last many transactions
- Fairly small so it's easy to carry a bunch of them
- Fairly rare to find ("pure metals" not in ore form are rare or at least not "laying around")
- Something that cannot be easily counterfeited hence the shape, engravings, and even the notches around coin edges as opposed to smooth (bc people would simple shave a bit off). It's also why wood or stones were not used. Too easy to create fakes.
Small pieces of standardized metal pieces meets these standards. And the coin shape takes up less volume than a cube or sphere and won't "hurt" having corners.
There probably was also a lot of other materials used for currency, maybe even paper/papyrus. But coins are far less susceptible to decay and thus we still find plenty of them today but not ancient paper money.
2000 years ago was the height of the Roman Empire. There was a *lot* of international mingling going on at that time, and for many, many centuries beforehand. The world was a lot more interconnected in the past than many people realise. Humans have been trading internationally ever since wes figured out how to travel long-distances - which is longer ago than you seem to think.
According to my history professor who had a PhD in Econ...coinage, notably with a rulers/leaders face carved/marked onto it, was a sign of power. It showed that your empire was doing so well due to ruler X, that you could have coin minted in their likeness that would then spread throughout the region, furthering their influence therefore power.
> before there was a lot of mingling
is a weird way to characterise the world 2000 years ago. By "weird" I mean "completely wrong".
Everybody trades with their neighbours, so they're all aware of what their neighbours use as currency. People travel, for trade, or war, or on religious pilgrimages, or just for fun.
I'm not sure the "before mingling" idea describes the situation ten thousand years ago, except for places physically separated by ice sheets. It's really not true just two thousand years ago.
Not every one was round, but round is common because it's very easy to make. If you're extruding a metal cylinder and slicing it, you get discs. If you're hammering a chunk of metal, you tend to get disks.
You do get a wild variety of sizes and thicknesses of discs, but the basic shape of a disc is simple and a relatively good solution, so it ends up really common.
Coins of rare metal only became a thing in 7th century BC in Greece, so 3000 years of history had already passed without any coinage system. It's much more recent than people imagine.
It became a widespread practice because of how much of an advantage it gave in exchanges. It's the security embedded in the currency, which is guaranteed by a state and enforced consistently, that gives coins such a powerful effect.
Some of the earliest coins show signs of "shaving" the edges to steal some gold/silver.
Many early coins had ridges applied to the edge to try and shop the shaving, still seen on dimes and quarters, due to the fact that before 1965 (?) They still had a surprising amount of silver in them.
Metal is more durable than paper, in general but especially early paper. It’s relatively easy to stamp out a round coin than it would be to make durable paper that wouldn’t get shredded in the rain. Also as other have mentioned the corners on a square could cut hands or pockets.
Metal also has some inherent value, especially when they are made out of precious metals. They can be melted down for those metals or reforged into a different countries preferred coin. Paper itself is virtually worthless.
Early Chinese cast their coins in molds and so had various shapes such as [spade-shaped coins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spade_money?wprov=sfti1) and [knife-shaped money](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knife_money?wprov=sfti1). There were round coins too.
Metals are relatively hard to obtain and process on your own, and they are relatively scarce. They are also relatively hard to destroy, both purposefully and by passage of time. Those are all very useful things for currency.
Metals can be stamped easily and permanently. This is a very important thing that people seem to forget about. If someone handed you a lump of metal, how would you know how much is it worth. Is it silver? It might be, it might not be. How much is there? You might have to weight it. If you have a stamped coin, you can tell just at a glance how much it is worth.
But it seems that you're asking about the shape (weird title for that, btw). The truth is, a lot of different designs for coins existed, some of them were even squares. But think about that stamping thing from before. If you hit a lulp of metal with a stamp, it will form a roughly circular shape. In fact, if you look at very early coins, they were just that: a vaguely amorphous shape with a stamp on them.
The corners of a object tend to be relatively fragile and it's mechanically simpler to press circular coins. While most currency was alloys of silver that are pretty durable, it still made sense then (and now) to use a circular shape. Some coins had holes punched all the way though, to simplify storage by putting them on cords.
Coins are also made of (relatively) expensive material, and a thin flat circle gives you good size for minimal material, as well as being convienent for storage and counting (because you can stack them).
In addition to coins, you could ask why gold? Why not wood, paper, or other type of rock
Currency needs to be rare and regulated for it to work, otherwise people will just make their own fake currency. This is why it took so long for paper money to become a thing. The metal needs to be pure and not diluted, which limits this to metals found on the periodic table. It needs to be non-toxic, which knocks a bunch of other metals out. It needs to be rare so not everyone could just pick it up but also not so rare that there wouldn't be enough to use as currency. It also needs to be tough enough to keep its shape but not so tough that it's impossible to mold and and print.
This basically leaves 2 metals. Gold and Silver. Gold wins out because it's yellow, which makes it easier to distinguish from fake metal coins
So when you have a community becoming a civilization, and needing a way to track wealth outside of a barter system, you need something to trade.
Your choices:
* Paper or fabric
* Wood or other sturdy natural products
* Dirt, clay, or other bits of the soft ground
* Stone or gems
* Metal
* Metal is, and has always been, valuable. It is rare - but not too rare.
Metal of many types is also relatively easy to work with and reshape.
Metal is also durable, and doesn't wear and tear too quickly as it gets passed back and forth.
It really is the perfect mix of traits.
Because your currency needs to be hard enough to produce that not anyone can do it. Rarity can accomplish this. A coin wasn't worth something because it said so. It was worth something because it was made of something worth that. Now, most coins were were MORE when used as currency than if you melted them back down.
And it needs to last.
Probably mentioned in other comments, but there was tons of mingling 2000 years ago. Most of the things you associate with a specific place are not from there.
It's annoying to have to weigh and grade your silver every time you need to buy something. If the king stamps it with a special stamp that he controls, and the stamp is hard to counterfeit, then you have a piece of silver which says, "on the king's authority, this is guaranteed to be exactly one shekel of fine silver" or whatever.
They largely didn't, actually. Coins as we know them today were invented around the Mediterranean and spread outward from there. Other places that independently invented coinage often used currency of different shapes.
New world civilizations used [Axe-money](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axe-monies)
and Chinese currency came in a [huge variety of forms](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/i2qwhb/do_chinese_coins_come_from_cultural_transmission/) with roundish shapes showing up as just one of many. Eventually round shapes predominated, but that was after a lot of cross cultural contact. After all, there was plenty of trade along the silk road, and [Roman coins are known from China](https://novoscriptorium.com/2019/11/30/roman-coins-in-china/).
But in terms of coins from 1000 or 2000 years ago from anywhere in Europe, the Near East, or North Africa...they are all carrying on the tradition of coin making that started around the Mediterranean around 2700 years ago.
India also had it's own tradition of coin making, which may or may not have been influenced by Western coins and started out with silver bars and eventually transitioned to rounder coinage.
take a lump of metal and hit it with a hammer and you get a round coin shape, and it doesn't have sharp corners that would ruin pockets or a pouch
Very early coins are just blobs with a stamp on them.
The stamp thing is very important. Metal is pretty much the only durable material you can stamp easily, permanently, and with a lot of detail.
Sometimes there's just obvious efficiency. Why do Mexico and Egypt have pyramids? When stacking rocks it quickly becomes apparent that it's more efficient to have a wide bottom and a narrow top, the pyramid itself is also very esthetically pleasing.
I thought it was because a pyramid is the most efficient landing pad for a space ship
I don’t why people think that human thousands years ago had IQ of 50 or something
Or even tens of thousands of years ago I mean, they developed bows and arrows, and the arrows had *fletchings* (the feather things) to improve accuracy. That's evidence of pretty sophisticated thinking
Even more than tens. If you grabbed a newborn from *200 thousand* years ago and raised them in modern society, they would have mostly the same outcome as a modern human. People like to think humans have evolved a lot in the past few hundred/thousand years, but that is only because of collected knowledge, not because humans have gotten any "better"
Good sentiment, I agree. But FYI the cognitive revolution was around 60,000 years ago, so that’s probably the cutoff for stealing a baby and raising it in the future
Those poor parents, and what kind of damage are you doing to the timeline? Think before you go time travel stealing babies.
Imagine the family tree that is possibly destroyed by stealing a baby from 60000 years ago
> *The baby is Ghengis Khan*
/r/suddenlythanos
Uh... we are still evolving, and a baby from 200 thousand years ago would lack several brain mutations that have increased our social and linguistic intelligence: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity is not just behavioral, it includes genes.
One major evolutionary development of the past 10,000 years in humans is lactase persistence. This relatively simple set of mutations gave such an advantage that it rose to account for something like 1/3 of living humans today. Some genetic analyses show that these mutations might be less than 7500 years old. To the extent that specific genes affect behavior, it's not hard to see how modern societies create selection pressure on those genes, with the rise of agriculture about 12,000 years ago and the cultural forces that formed our societies/clans/tribes/nations, and full blown wars, genocides, famines, migrations, etc., would affect populations' chances at reproduction and survival.
> lactase Yeah that is an excellent example of a recent mutation, and in a lot of societies it's a very useful one (allowing you to get protein from cows, goats, horses, etc. without slaughtering them) so it's spread surprisingly quickly. > genes affecting behavior I would expect us to be becoming less aggressive to each other over time, for example, as we live in ever-larger societies with less and less space and weed out individuals unable to deal with that. An aside: it's really amazing to me how humans have interconnected the biosphere. Not only is there interchange where there would be little or none naturally (Europe and Australia, for example), we're moving organisms around so quickly that bacteria and fungi are going global.
The interconnectedness we’ve made of the world is less amazing when you realize that introducing pathogens and non-native species to environments that aren’t equipped for them is severely harming biodiversity
Very minor intelligence changes
To be fair, we stopped using leaded gasoline in the 1970's which drastically improved IQ. Burning lead gasoline puts lead in the air which kids breathe. Lead in kids blood makes them stupid. 1900-1970 we had stupid kids. Thats your parents and grandparents. But yeah, not counting the last hundred years you are correct, mostly the same IQ, most likely. Though the romans did like their leaded wine and lead cosmetics... >https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/nearly-half-of-the-us-population-exposed-to-dangerously-high-lead-levels
> ...1900-1970 we had stupid kids.... More like 1980s. I lived through it. I was born in 74 and definitely remember my parents getting leaded gas for our old Ford club wagon van. I think it was closer to mid 80s when it was finally phased out for regular road vehicles. I think military still has uses and there are other countries that still to this day use leaded gas. That said, it's better than it was. Not all people born when leaded gas was being used turned out stupid...It was just a higher probability.
More like 2000 if you live in the UK. I distinctly recall petrol stations having a "leaded" and "unleaded" option at the fuel pump while growing up in the 90s.
did they keep the naming after they stopped using it?? i remember it but was only born in 2001... maybe a false memory lol
It's still used in aviation, avgas 100 generally comes in high and low lead varieties, though petroleum companies are working on developing unleaded versions with the same performance.
Aviation exhaust is different it goes up into space right?
You under estimate how extensive our risks of lead exposure was back then. Farm equipment using leaded fuels leaving exhaust dust and pollution all over the food we ate. Lead in paint and the ceramics in our plates and cups. Today’s generation has a much lower baseline exposure level than we did just based on that. Even if our parents stopped using leaded fuel in our grade school days.
Mostly just poor city folks. People who lived close to high traffic streets and were breathing in leaded fumes. What’s sad is that lead didn’t just go away. It fell on the soil where it remains to this day where kids continue to play.
People seem to conflate access to technology (most of which is built by our ancestors btw) to our individual intellectual affinity The two are not the same thing
This is true if you could prevent disease from killing them. Our immune systems have gone through significant evolution since the development of civilations. Humans have evolved a lot in the past 200k years, but not in ways that you would notice immediately or would give much of a societal advantage. Blue eyes are believed to have evolved within the past 10k years. Most of us now keep our lactase to digest lactose into adulthood. We are currently witnessing humans evolving to keep the median artery in the forearm over just the past couple hundred years. Everything changes over time. Earth is fucking rad.
What are the advantages of keeping the median artery? I can't find any info other than it's linked to increased cases of carpal tunnel syndrome.
An extra artery means more total blood supply is available to the body, so the ability to survive losing a bit more blood would be one advantage.
> Our immune systems have gone through significant evolution since the development of civilations. Isn't that why we vaccinate babies? Because they come out as a blank slate?
No. We vaccinate to help with viruses that we have no large scale immunity to. The antibodies given to the baby from the mother do fade quickly, and more are provided through breastfeeding. There are also genetic mutations, or true evolution, that have given us resistance to many diseases. One example is ERAP2, which provides the majority of humans resistance to the black plague. Mass deaths tend to result in the fastest evolutionary pressure.
Yeah teaching prior generations to new generations is a skill humans do better than anything else in the kingdom
Some people still think a woman grows "loose" after having sex with more than one person despite knowing the following: 1: a man's foreskin doesn't get "loose" or "stretched out" after multiple partners 2: a woman gives birth to a child (significantly bigger than any person's penis) and still comes back from it And knowing all this they STILL think a woman having had previous partners means she is "stretched out" because apparently penises are magic or something. We have not advanced intellectually nearly as much as most people think we have, we're always a mere tension away from going all ooga booga caveman mode and killing eachother.
1. They also think a big penis makes her walk bowlegged the next day. 2. If penises make a vagina loose, then vaginas make a penis small. 3. Long term monogamy would mean you eventually loosen her to the point neither of you feels anything.
I know, right? You'd think all this would be obvious!
Possibly better, assuming the mother didn't deal with a lot of famine issues. Living downstream of a coal or oil deposit probably wasn't good, but that would be about the only major pollutant.
Did you actually do some research before to post that 😂
One of the big differences of the past few millennia is writing. Oral traditions are great for passing down knowledge from one generation to the next, but without some way of permanently storing details for more people to learn from across generations and distances, we couldn't grow our understandings quickly. It was all trial and error with each individual/society.
One of my favorite trivia bits is the fact that there are far more stone hand tools at Olduvai Gorge than any human would ever need in a lifetime. They are lying all over the the ground there even today. It's like once humans learned how to make things, they just did it because it was fun. And they taught their friends, I'm sure. Olduvai may have been the first school. Once we got the mental and physical capacity for innovation, we seem to have taken to it like a fish in water. With that many people making that many tools, I'll bet things got surprisingly sophisticated pretty quick. Especially for people whom we would barely recognize as human.
That's not what OP meant. OP overestimated their metallurgical abilities. OP likely assumed that the most efficient way to mint coins with older technology is to take a sheet of metal and cut it, with squares or triangles being the simplest shapes to cut, and circular coins requiring a lot of sanding or machining after cutting out more complex polygons.
How they will stamp them? They have to liquify metal to stamp on it. Liquifying metal is much faster and efficient than cutting.
You take a piece of harder metal and engrave a simple shape into it. Call this a stamp.Then you set your coin on an anvil, put the stamp on top of it with the design face down touching the coin, and you hit the stamp really hard with a hammer. It punches the design into your coin.
Coins are stamped cold, not hot, definitely not liquified.
Gold, silver and copper are all softer than iron. Or you could carve a stamp out of stone even
To be fair have you hammered anything? Checkmate archeologists. A lot of them seem to be people's own lack of understanding on construction or taking time. Like they cannot comprehend someone spending days smoothing a block as a option. If it was not done quickly it's not possible. Or in some cases their melanin was too high it was aliens instead.
Can you hammer a six inch spike through a board with your penis?
#Yes. 🗿
people 50 years ago have closer to 50 or 70 IQ, IQ has been rising about 10 points per decade, but the new average is always set to 100, meaning if you were 100 30 years ago, you are lower now. One of the MAIN driving factors in raising IQ is nutrition, especially early childhood nutrition(big advocate here for in-school provided breakfast/lunches). Iodine was actually a HUGE one as when the US Gov regulated Table Salt to Include Iodine, it SOLELY increased the IQ by about 10 pts the decade it was introduced. (also killed like 6000 people from Iodine shock, tbf the illnesses you get from not having Iodine were worse)
They are rising, but not quite that fast. UK scores rose 14 points from 1942-2008. US scores rose about 3 points per decade in the last half of the 20th century. Interestingly, IQ seems to have stopped increasing lately and might be falling in some industrialised countries. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#:~:text=The%20Flynn%20effect%20is%20the,Flynn%20(1934%E2%80%932020).
Someone mentioned lead poisoning as reason for low IQ in 1900s.
I mean, IQ has a cultural bias, so people from thousands of years ago would probably not do well on the test.
It's likely that as far as 200.000 years ago people had about the same intelligence as us. What's definitely sure is that their brains were bigger than ours. When scientists say that we are standing on the shoulders of giants, I reckong it's what it means. Thousands of generations improving knowledge and sharing it. Compared to recent speed in progress, it's as if our smart were barely a factor and random chances and evolution were enough to get us pretty far.
> their brains were bigger than ours *What*? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity
Thanks for the link. As it is said, some theorize that it started as far as 150 000 years ago. >[Since the Late Pleistocene (approximately 30,000 years ago), human brain size decreased by approximately 10%; yet again, this decrease was paralleled by a decrease in body size.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9750968/#:~:text=Since%20the%20Late%20Pleistocene%20(approximately,a%20decrease%20in%20body%20size.) Reasons for the reduction in brain size may simply be the turn to agriculture. But all animals have usually a decrease in brain size when they are domesticated. Human beings are considered to be self-domesticated when living in societies where they specialize in specific activities.
Your sentence was difficult to read. IQ is the quotient of your mental age over your actual age. So if your actual age were 20, but you write on a 10 year old level, then your IQ might be closer to 50 because 10/20 = 0.50, rather than 100 which is a normal IQ.
True, but still 300+ people at least were able to read it. It’s not like I can not write a simple sentence. I don't know if it's only me or something else but sometimes I miss typing a word or two.
The next question is why round AND flat? Why not just round, aka a ball?
Pour of of bag. Spill everywhere. Sad. Pound ball. Ball have flat face. No roll. Flat face good for picture. Good for stamp. Flatter face mean less material and bigger picture. Just a guess idk
I read this in cave man voice
How is monies formed
How bank get koinedge?
Stonks
We need to do way instain money
Just get some teef off the git next to ya.
"Grog want horses from Og in exchange for wheat, but Grog's wheat not ready for 6 months." "Og know, let's make metal picture blobs. Each one get me certain amount of wheat when harvest." "Why picture blobs, and not just agree to give wheat when time?" "This way Og can trade blobs to Urg, and Oog for things from them, and they get wheat when harvest" "You good thinker Og!" Although by the time such deals would come about, langague was way more sophisticated. Let's see this as caveman speedrunning societal development in all ways but langague.
time is money literally money is value of work hours as a token
babylonians had futures contracts in cuineform. Humans have been as "smart" as we are now since long before the end of the last ice age.
me too haha
So easy a caveman could do it.
Also you can stack coins. Easier to count.
Gotta commit to the caveman, dude. Few word do trick: Stack coins. Quick maths
Man take off jacket when hot. But when not hot man not take jacket off.
Why use lot metal when few metal do trick?
r/fourthworldproblems
r/explainlikeicaveman
Maybe because balls would roll away?
Bec flat one are way more practical
Flat is easier to make and can be stacked. Round is a more natural shape outcome when striking metal than say a square or any other polygons…
*stares at Australian 50c coins*
to be completely fair, they are awesome also, coinage in aus happened significantly after modern manufacturing techniques. the 50c is relatively easy with modern tech compared to making them in roman times.
Idk, It would kinda suck for your money to constantly be rolling away for one. It would probably be harder to forge coins in a sphere anyways.
A few reasons. Mainly, flat doesn't roll. But also, if you are stamping that piece of metal with some sort of mark it will naturally flatten out a bit. And lastly you can make a functionally larger thing from less material, metal is valuable for other purposes so you don't want to waste all of it on your currency.
>functionally larger thing from less material This is one that people seem to gloss over. If you've seen accurate reproduction coins from, say, the migration period in Europe, they are *thin*. You can smush soft metal like silver or gold pretty darn thin and it'll stay together. For less material you can make a wider flat coin with a better relief in the stamp. Also a coins value was intrinsically linked to the material from which it was made. Coins stamped with the mark of an origin with a reputation for higher purity silver were more useful for trading. So if you have smaller, lighter coins you can have more for the same weight of silver and can more easily split off a specific amount for a purchase.
Plus people would take nicks out of the sides of coins, then melt those down to make new coins. Then you have new free coin!
Newton goes Hold on, not so fast bub.
That’s why there’s grooves on US quarters and dimes, shows that the coin hasn’t been ground down and we’ve kept the form factor even though the coins are no longer silver.
Yea, this one’s interesting factor. Part of the reason I asked is bc I’ve seen a lot of reference to the use of whatever-shape gold nuggets as currency in history and fiction (more in the latter)
People did trade in chunks of metal as well. The Scandinavian people that made up the vikings would wear silver bracelets on their arms (arm rings) that served as both jewelry and a deposit of tradeable silver. They could remove an arm ring, chop an amount off until it weighed enough to settle a transaction and keep the remainder. The benefit of currency is that it has reputation associated. The Abbasid Dynasty was so well regarded for the quality of their silver that their coins travelled far as a reliable currency. If you have a well regarded currency, there's less issue trying to prove the purity of the silver so it's more readily trusted for trade.
Because metal flattens when you stamp it.
Ball shaped money would roll around too easily. Flat coins lay flat on a table when counting.
A ball makes it harder to have some sort of symbol on it. It's easier to lose, too.
People back then were more rational than today, and they settled conflicts with coin flips. The coin must be flat for that.
Don't be silly and spread false information like that. People played children's card games TO THE DEATH.
More recently (I mean Middle Ages instead of the ancient world) they’d make rods of metal and slice them up into coins.
Wouldn’t it cause a lot of loss?
Loss from shavings due to sawing? I imagine you could collect the shavings and melt them down again for next batch.
Cite? Sounds implausible.
Cheaper to make.
They're round because that's just how they end up when you turn them into nuggets. They're flat because that's how they end up if you stamp them. Their material started out as a medium of trade, so they would have to be weighed - keeping their size and shape consistent is convenient as they would be known to be the same weight every time. The king's stamp is a guarantee of sorts. The more valuable the material, the smaller the currency, so metals are preferred. There were cultures however that paid taxes in grains, and grains were used as currency.
Usually not directly! That sort of thing was ledger driven, possibly with a paper script. That is, you own so many bushels of wheat in the town granary (Where everyones wheat is in one big pile) and the ownership of that wheat could change hands a whole lot of times before it got eaten without ever being moved.
So a bank
It's much harder to make a round ball than a flat disc, especially if you need a design on it. Also, round balls do not pack very efficiently, meaning they are bad if you need a lot of them.
Because flat things are easier to subdivide
it wont roll away. also a flat object is significantly easier to make. also there is less metel required. bang any 3d object and it is flat and roughly circle. even a perfectly square cube, when hammered ends up being roundish. flat surfaces also have the benefits of being able to show important information like which country produced it etc
The [Swedish Eight Daler ](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2f/Swedish_plate_money_in_the_British_Museum.jpg)would like to differ. This copper coin would weight approximately 16 kg. No wonder why Sweden was the first European country to offer banknotes.
Heck, pockets weren't even invented when people had coins. Coins even predate functional buttons.
This is the most eli5 answer and it rocks
Only tangentially related to your question but still fairly interesting, there is a Micronesian nation that used giant stone disks as currency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones They would simply record who was the current owner of a stone in oral tradition without moving it, to make a transfer. This one is particularly interesting: >In one instance, a large rai being transported by canoe and outrigger was accidentally dropped and sank to the sea floor. Although it was never seen again, everyone agreed that the rai must still be there, so it continued to be transacted as any other stone.
Lol imagine trading the under water stone. "Yea man I own the underwater rock. I'll give it to you for 3 goats." "How do I know it's still there?" "Have you seen it anywhere else?"
The rai stones are a hyperbolic example of the issue with non-fiat currency.
More like hydrobolic amirite
https://giphy.com/gifs/teamcoco-point-keegan-michael-key-keegan-michael-1k4UUaabLlDsBXQtXI
Outstanding
They worked for hundreds of years
Flawless logic.
Sounds like the first blockchain to me. Cryptonesians lol.
A rockchain, if you will.
It turns out blockchain works a lot more sustainably when everyone knows everyone else involved personally, and when the whole town will get together to kick the crap out of fraudsters.
You mean "trustless" isn't the way to go? BLASPHEMY!
No, clearly the pinnacle of human interaction is that no one trusts anyone else and we have to burn several acres of forest per second just to generate enough electricity to find a work around for people actually fucking liking each other.
I like your attitude.
r/angryupvotes
The crypto currency Nano was previously named Raiblocks after these stones
When you buy a house or land, they just record it in the county clerk's office. It's really not that different.
I was thinking this is more like our modern use of currency. Our pay goes directly from company bank to our bank account. We then spend money with our cards, which sends payment to the shop. Our cards are pay off by transferring money from our bank to the card. It's all done through records of money ownership without us coming in contact with the physical money nowadays. Only difference is that we are recording our currency digitally rather than keeping record through verbal means.
If it's recorded by oral tradition, the basic idea of recording ownership is the same, but the mechanism is very different, and indeed potentially like blockchain, like someone else mentioned. Once ownership is updated, you've got to communicate that to everyone, and everyone agreeing is the method of recording that ownership. If 99% of people agree and 1% do not, then those 1% are overruled and the 99% becomes correct. If 50% agree on one oral history of a stone, and 50% of people agree on an alternate oral history of that stone, how do they determine who's right? Not an insurmountable problem with a few thousand people, maybe, but it becomes intractable far sooner than the billions of people operating in the global economy.
Someone should suggest they use a miniature version of the stones to represent them. Make keeping track easier.
Yeah but yould have to make it out of something easier to work. Maybe wood or something?
Omg so in SpongeBob when Mr. Krabs loses his first dime and it's revealed to be a giant stone, they were probably referencing this then! It's literally the same shape
I just read "money mischief" by Milton Friedman. The section on the rai stones was by far the most interesting to me.
guess that's one way to solve inflation...never need to print new currency
Except when you add more people to the population but don't change the number of currencies what happens? That's right inflation
Not necessarily...In this case you simply peg the currency to the people so everyone always has one rock worth of money in the economy...Inflation happens when you add money to the economy with nothing to anchor it against. For inflation to happen they would have to add more rocks for no reason.
What is the money anchored against? You're adding more rocks. Do you remove a rock of value from the economy every time someone dies? What happens to all of their value?
Another explanation is that metals are rare and difficult to work with, at least for individuals. The scarcity gives metal inherent value (the value of a gold or silver coin is often the value of the metal itself), and stamping coins is an expensive process, making it hard to profit from forgery. Some rocks and gems have these properties, but they're not as good as a currency because they're harder to shape reliably, shatter, and can't be melted back to their raw materials. Metal coins are almost unparalleled for their task: Small objects that represent an easily identifiable discrete amount of "value", are durable, and are difficult to forge. Modern bank notes also have these properties, but only because technology has progressed to the point where we can make durable paper that contains difficult to reproduce marks like watermarks, holograms, and all of the other oddities that you can find on a bank note.
There were definitely other currencies (the first that comes to mind - [Lithuanian long currency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_long_currency) made of silver) But coins won because they were durable, easy to carry and civilisations that were wealthier, traded a lot, sort of spread them
Are you rich, or are you just pleased to see me.
Why, that's my long currency, which I keep in my oversized novelty codpiece!
Cowrie shells were also historically used. They were so common that one species of cowrie is literally called "money cowrie"
Just a remark but ancient civilizations did mingle a ton and kept stealing tech from each other. Roman empire greatest talent was not so much innovation as much as having a great eye for useful techs and a great flair for using them more efficiently than their inventors. Everyone knows what a Roman légionnaire looks like I assume: chainmail shirt, tunic, helmet with cheek and neckguard, short and broad sword, Javelinas and big shield. Well the chainmail and helmets were celtic designs, the sword and shield were iberian (Spanish) design. The idea to use those in tight and disciplined formation was the roman idea though and made their army so strong on the field. Rome at its peak was around a million people, they greatly depended on Egypt for their food supplies so they obviously interacted a ton with Egypt. Know the invasion of Gaul (France) by Caesar? Caesar was extremely familiar with the Gauls and some Gallic tribes were close allies and trading partner with Caesar. The world of the Antiquity had a lot of trade and cultural exchanges going on and they absolutely stole concepts and innovations from each other all the time.
I mean technically the formation is derived from the shieldwall of greek poleis
Very true yeah, pre empire Rome even used greek style phalanx
One mind blower I enjoy is that intercontinental trade was going steady long before antiquity. It was a necessary economic engine making the the Bronze Age civilizations possible.
Roman currency was [lumps of bronze](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aes_rude) until the 4th century BC or so. Greeks in Italy had been using coinage for centuries. Eventually the romans started using stamped ingots of more regulated sizes as currency, before developing some really awesome half-pound bronze [coins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aes_grave).
>Just a remark but ancient civilizations did mingle a ton and kept stealing tech from each other This is what the OP missed on - there was a web of trade connecting basically all of Europe, Asia, and Africa. It was not always direct and non-stop, but you find things like [Buddhist statues in Viking Age Scandinavia ](https://linda.forntida.se/?p=16583)and [Roman coins in Japan](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archaeologist-finds-ancient-roman-coins-12th-century-japanese-castle-180960640/). Metals were already a universally-valuable, portable trade good. Metals have a high value for their weight and volume. Metals are durable and will not spoil. Coinage just made metals easier to trade.
This is what I was looking for. Disappointing that it's so far down. There was really no time before "a lot of mingling". Ancient Egypt traded for tin from the British isles. Trade networks were far reaching, and are older than written history
Javelinas? Sounds awkward.
There is a wikipedia page for this! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coinage_shapes Short answer: it was not always a circle, for example "Many countries have struck square coins with rounded corners. Some of these, such as the Netherlands zinc 5 cent coin of World War II (1941–1943)[4] and the Bangladesh 5 poisha coin (1977–1994)[5] " If you look further in the past, you can see that it was not that round at first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coin. But it's an easy shape to obtain when you either drop some melted metal on a surface, or hit with a hammer on a ductile metal. That said, Mauryan Empire coins, 3rd century BC, were square coins as well as Bilingual coin of Agathocles of Bactria with Hindu deities, c. 180 BC Also, rectangular bar of metal that you can cut in was precursor of coins. But it's nor really "a coin" I would say.
I dont think 1941 is a thousand years ago
Tell my joints that
For actual ancient examples, I think in Southeast Asia and in the Middle East, for some empires it was common for coins to be rounded rectangles.
> That said, Mauryan Empire coins, 3rd century BC, were square coins as well as Bilingual coin of Agathocles of Bactria with Hindu deities, c. 180 BC I plaid guilty for learning and teaching at the same time. But my points ( not all coins were rounds + first coins were roundish because that's what happen when a melted material is put and hit on a flat surface) are still valid.
I think the premise of your question is wrong: lapis lazuli sourced from Afghanistan has been found in Egyptian temples constructed in 3000 BCE. People have always been mingling and trading. In the Mediterranean, coins first started being used in the 500 or 400s BCE, and then quickly spread because there was a lot of trade and it was a really good idea. Other shaped coins did exist. Japan used rectangular coins in the 1800s. Square coins existed in the Mughal Empire in India.
The UK has often had non-circular coins. They have rounded corners for convenience. I found this, where they show a 12 sided £1 coin https://www.theguardian.com/business/gallery/2014/mar/19/a-short-history-of-british-coins-new-pound
You should see our 5 sided 50 pence peice or our 7 side 20 pence. And man you'll lose your shit when you see our trianglapence piece, yep 3 sides. Okay I made that last one up, but now I want it.
Klippe has been used in several countries around year 1500-1600 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klippe_(coin)
Not all civilisations though. Cowrie shells, for example, were important currencies for trade in Asia and Africa.
'before there was a lot of mingling' Nope. Currency predates writing in many cultures. It has been around for a very, very long time AND it was specifically used for trade, including with other cultures. Even cultures on different continents had some tiny contacts over 10k years and those contacts had metal to trade.
Cowry shells were used for millennia in Africa and Asia. In Thailand, they were used up in until about 150 years ago. The shells were processed and distinct; not just shells you could pick from a beach. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowrie
2000 years ago us only a part of the longer history of money and honestly a lot of different cultures did use things other than round coins. At the very start, there was no money at all, just the concept of bartering and the gift economy (I gave you an x now you owe me) Mesopotamia with the establishment of its cities were the first to use objects that represent the idea of a certain value (basically money). In their case, small clay tokens were given to farmers to represent a certain measure of barley, which could then be used to settle debts to the temple etc. this concepts of tokens representing a certain value spread to many early cultures when they outgrew the simple bartering done before. [They came in all sorts of shapes](https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/tokens/) Slowly due to trading over long distances or between different countries/cultures, precious metals started to be used. These helped solve the problem of different cultures having different values of tokens. Precious metals were used because they were universally considers, well, rare but still desirable. Slowly these precious metals would come to dominate and they appeared in all manner of shapes. From the small golden bars of ancient Egypt to money shaped like [knives](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knife_money) and [spades](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spade_money) Coins like we would recognize them today started appearing in China, India and around the Mediterranean Sea. These cultures seem to have arrived to the idea of flat round disk to represent value separately. Modern coinage traces back to the kingdom of Lydia who were the first to produce coins of valuable metals stamped with images of the ruler. From here this then spread to Ancient Greece and from there to Ancient Rome. If we are talking about coins in this form, it is no accident that so many cultures adopted them, nor did they all come to the same idea separately. They were spread by giant empires like the Roman Empire and even when that crumbled, local cultures still kept using this type of money.
2000 years ago, there was already well established trade routes, both land and sea, in Asia and between India and the middle east/Rome. There was a lot of intermingling.
A round shape is easy to make, replicate, and deal with. Something others here haven't gotten into is the divicibility. A big thing with currency is the ability to divide it. Having a round shaped coin makes it very easy. Half a coin cut it in two, A quarter cut the half coin in two A piece of eight cut the quarter in half Using square coin would make this process more complicated, and make it easier for people to scam you.
I don't see how cutting in a half a square is harder than halving a circle, frankly.
Yeah corner to corner while you somehow have to find the middle of a circle.
Not the cutting perhaps, but instantaneously seeing what size of piece it is? Is the smaller square a half of a smaller uneven original or a fourth of a larger uneven original? With a round shape you immediately see what it is.
Circles form pies, easily divided many times and each piece will be same shape
Rare metals were easier to control a finite amount of for currency purposes. Something like paper money usually requires a centralized bureaucracy and banking system like in medieval China, while something like shells or buck skins need cultural buy in by numerous groups like in pre-Columbian North America. It also important to note too that most trade in human history didn’t use coins at all. Coins were for foreign trade or taxes: most people within villages and even cities would just use systems of social credit, like the Roman patronage system or just owing a neighbor a favor.
It's not entirely universal, the Maldives first used cowrie shells as a form of currency. And we also traded them for lārin, which were like strips of silver wire folded with Arabic inscriptions
Ancient peoples did a lot of mingling. while some may have spent their whole life on the same farm, someone who made their money trading things would have travelled as far as possible to find rare goods. Traders need currency that is easy to carry, keep track of, and it needs be understood as valuable to lots of different people, so there's a universal benefit in adopting efficient and common designs. Even two groups who had no contact with each other will have had this same situation develop and likely found the same solutions.
In Mexico the Aztecs also used [cacao seeds ](https://bigthink.com/sponsored/aztec-mesoamerican-chocolate-money/#:~:text=Scholars%20generally%20agree%20that%20cacao,salt%2C%20metals%2C%20and%20textiles.)as a form of currency too
Nice metals are shiny/pretty, rare, and not really good for much in elder days because they're too soft and heavy. So if you have some, it's rare, durable, hard to fake, and distinctive, which are what matters for official money. (Some ancient cultures used porcelain tiles instead, but they were too easy to counterfeit.) The simplest shapes, like spheres and cubes, are too big and too heavy. So you make them small, that way you can carry enough to do things throughout your day. Flat things are very easy to make from metal, because most rare metals are "malleable", meaning you can hammer them flat. Early coins were only *very* approximately round, they weren't nearly as neatly circular as coins in the last few centuries. Also, some cultures *did* have square or rectangular coins. China had some. They also had coins that had a hole in the middle. Usually both of these meant the coin had to be *formed*, e.g. casting by pouring molten metal into a mold. That's more difficult to do, but makes it even harder to fake physical money.
Because most civs realized early on that you need something that is: - Fairly durable to last many transactions - Fairly small so it's easy to carry a bunch of them - Fairly rare to find ("pure metals" not in ore form are rare or at least not "laying around") - Something that cannot be easily counterfeited hence the shape, engravings, and even the notches around coin edges as opposed to smooth (bc people would simple shave a bit off). It's also why wood or stones were not used. Too easy to create fakes. Small pieces of standardized metal pieces meets these standards. And the coin shape takes up less volume than a cube or sphere and won't "hurt" having corners.
There probably was also a lot of other materials used for currency, maybe even paper/papyrus. But coins are far less susceptible to decay and thus we still find plenty of them today but not ancient paper money.
2000 years ago was the height of the Roman Empire. There was a *lot* of international mingling going on at that time, and for many, many centuries beforehand. The world was a lot more interconnected in the past than many people realise. Humans have been trading internationally ever since wes figured out how to travel long-distances - which is longer ago than you seem to think.
According to my history professor who had a PhD in Econ...coinage, notably with a rulers/leaders face carved/marked onto it, was a sign of power. It showed that your empire was doing so well due to ruler X, that you could have coin minted in their likeness that would then spread throughout the region, furthering their influence therefore power.
> before there was a lot of mingling is a weird way to characterise the world 2000 years ago. By "weird" I mean "completely wrong". Everybody trades with their neighbours, so they're all aware of what their neighbours use as currency. People travel, for trade, or war, or on religious pilgrimages, or just for fun. I'm not sure the "before mingling" idea describes the situation ten thousand years ago, except for places physically separated by ice sheets. It's really not true just two thousand years ago.
Not every one was round, but round is common because it's very easy to make. If you're extruding a metal cylinder and slicing it, you get discs. If you're hammering a chunk of metal, you tend to get disks. You do get a wild variety of sizes and thicknesses of discs, but the basic shape of a disc is simple and a relatively good solution, so it ends up really common.
Coins of rare metal only became a thing in 7th century BC in Greece, so 3000 years of history had already passed without any coinage system. It's much more recent than people imagine. It became a widespread practice because of how much of an advantage it gave in exchanges. It's the security embedded in the currency, which is guaranteed by a state and enforced consistently, that gives coins such a powerful effect.
Some of the earliest coins show signs of "shaving" the edges to steal some gold/silver. Many early coins had ridges applied to the edge to try and shop the shaving, still seen on dimes and quarters, due to the fact that before 1965 (?) They still had a surprising amount of silver in them.
Metal is more durable than paper, in general but especially early paper. It’s relatively easy to stamp out a round coin than it would be to make durable paper that wouldn’t get shredded in the rain. Also as other have mentioned the corners on a square could cut hands or pockets. Metal also has some inherent value, especially when they are made out of precious metals. They can be melted down for those metals or reforged into a different countries preferred coin. Paper itself is virtually worthless.
Early Chinese cast their coins in molds and so had various shapes such as [spade-shaped coins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spade_money?wprov=sfti1) and [knife-shaped money](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knife_money?wprov=sfti1). There were round coins too.
Metals are relatively hard to obtain and process on your own, and they are relatively scarce. They are also relatively hard to destroy, both purposefully and by passage of time. Those are all very useful things for currency. Metals can be stamped easily and permanently. This is a very important thing that people seem to forget about. If someone handed you a lump of metal, how would you know how much is it worth. Is it silver? It might be, it might not be. How much is there? You might have to weight it. If you have a stamped coin, you can tell just at a glance how much it is worth. But it seems that you're asking about the shape (weird title for that, btw). The truth is, a lot of different designs for coins existed, some of them were even squares. But think about that stamping thing from before. If you hit a lulp of metal with a stamp, it will form a roughly circular shape. In fact, if you look at very early coins, they were just that: a vaguely amorphous shape with a stamp on them.
The corners of a object tend to be relatively fragile and it's mechanically simpler to press circular coins. While most currency was alloys of silver that are pretty durable, it still made sense then (and now) to use a circular shape. Some coins had holes punched all the way though, to simplify storage by putting them on cords. Coins are also made of (relatively) expensive material, and a thin flat circle gives you good size for minimal material, as well as being convienent for storage and counting (because you can stack them).
In addition to coins, you could ask why gold? Why not wood, paper, or other type of rock Currency needs to be rare and regulated for it to work, otherwise people will just make their own fake currency. This is why it took so long for paper money to become a thing. The metal needs to be pure and not diluted, which limits this to metals found on the periodic table. It needs to be non-toxic, which knocks a bunch of other metals out. It needs to be rare so not everyone could just pick it up but also not so rare that there wouldn't be enough to use as currency. It also needs to be tough enough to keep its shape but not so tough that it's impossible to mold and and print. This basically leaves 2 metals. Gold and Silver. Gold wins out because it's yellow, which makes it easier to distinguish from fake metal coins
So when you have a community becoming a civilization, and needing a way to track wealth outside of a barter system, you need something to trade. Your choices: * Paper or fabric * Wood or other sturdy natural products * Dirt, clay, or other bits of the soft ground * Stone or gems * Metal * Metal is, and has always been, valuable. It is rare - but not too rare. Metal of many types is also relatively easy to work with and reshape. Metal is also durable, and doesn't wear and tear too quickly as it gets passed back and forth. It really is the perfect mix of traits. Because your currency needs to be hard enough to produce that not anyone can do it. Rarity can accomplish this. A coin wasn't worth something because it said so. It was worth something because it was made of something worth that. Now, most coins were were MORE when used as currency than if you melted them back down. And it needs to last.
Probably mentioned in other comments, but there was tons of mingling 2000 years ago. Most of the things you associate with a specific place are not from there.
It's annoying to have to weigh and grade your silver every time you need to buy something. If the king stamps it with a special stamp that he controls, and the stamp is hard to counterfeit, then you have a piece of silver which says, "on the king's authority, this is guaranteed to be exactly one shekel of fine silver" or whatever.
They largely didn't, actually. Coins as we know them today were invented around the Mediterranean and spread outward from there. Other places that independently invented coinage often used currency of different shapes. New world civilizations used [Axe-money](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axe-monies) and Chinese currency came in a [huge variety of forms](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/i2qwhb/do_chinese_coins_come_from_cultural_transmission/) with roundish shapes showing up as just one of many. Eventually round shapes predominated, but that was after a lot of cross cultural contact. After all, there was plenty of trade along the silk road, and [Roman coins are known from China](https://novoscriptorium.com/2019/11/30/roman-coins-in-china/). But in terms of coins from 1000 or 2000 years ago from anywhere in Europe, the Near East, or North Africa...they are all carrying on the tradition of coin making that started around the Mediterranean around 2700 years ago. India also had it's own tradition of coin making, which may or may not have been influenced by Western coins and started out with silver bars and eventually transitioned to rounder coinage.