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Comment by Anotheroneagain | Hacker News Reader

Coins are an iron age invention. Bronze age civilizations didn't know money.

Romans produced so many coins that you can buy genuine Roman coins relatively cheaply online. They are found absolutely everywhere in the ancient port cities and Rome itself, every construction project will unearth a ton of lower denomination coins.

The Roman empire was thoroughly monetized.

The bronze age wasn't. The way it worked seems to be that there was a guy who knew what you wanted, knew what you produced, and knew people who could produce what you wanted, and he supplied you with it, and wanted what you could produce in return. Acting as a sort of intermediary between everybody else.

Well, neither was the Stone Age, but why are you even talking about the Bronze Age under a link that discusses Pompeii?

The relevant event took place in 79 AD, long after the end of the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean.

Because somebody claimed that you can't have organized society without banking, while for a long part of history there were organized societies without MONEY.

Well, yeah, now I understand.

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).

Taxes can be assessed as a percentage of production and collected as goods rather than collecting money amounting to the value of those goods.

While, with the exception of China, Bronze Age civilisations didn’t have _coins_, they did sometimes have some concept of money.

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.

Rome wasn’t a bronze age civilization.

Bronze age civilizations had money. Coins as we think of them became widespread in the iron age. Shekels, for instance, go back much further.

I didn't say it was. It was meant to refute the claim that you can't have an organized society without banking.

> Bronze age civilizations didn't know money.

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...

I suppose the translations may have a strong modern bias. Even the languages were only learned indirectly. First Old Persian in an unknown script had to be deciphered, then phonetic values for that script had to be used to decipher Akkadian, based in its similarity to other known languages. Sumerian was deciphered based on some education materials in Akkadian, and its translations seem like it's little more than a delusion that anything is unserstood at all.

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)

I do not understand Akkadian so I must defer to the work of Adolf Leo Oppenheim, the editor of The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago for over 20 years and the translator of that tablet.

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?

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