How Money Made Us Modern

                                           How Money Made Us Modern (1)  

    About 9,500 years ago, ancient accountants in Sumer invented a way tokeep track of farmers’ crops and livestock. They began using small piecesof baked clay, almost like the tokens used in board games today. One piecemight signify a measure of grain, while another with a different shapemight represent a farm animal or a jar of olive oil. 

    Those little ceramic shapes might not seem to have much in common withtoday’s $100 bill—or with the credit cards and online transactions that arerapidly taking the place of cash—but the roots of our modern methods ofpayment lie in those Sumerian tokens. Such early accounting tools evolvedinto a system of finance and into money itself: a symbolic representationof value that can be transferred from one person to another as payment forgoods or services. 

The Rise of Gold 

    Since ancient times, humans have used items to represent value—fromstones to animal skins, to whale teeth. In the ancient world, people oftenrelied upon symbols that had tangible value in their own right. The ancientChinese made payments with cowrie shells, which were prized for theirbeauty as materials for jewelry. As Glyn Davies notes in his book A History ofMoney from Ancient Times to the Present Day, cowrie shells are durable, easilycleaned and counted, and defy imitation or counterfeiting. 

    But eventually there arose a new, universal currency: gold. The gleamingmetal could be combined with other metals at high temperatures to createalloys,5 and was easy to melt and hammer into shapes. It became the rawmaterial for the first coins, created in Lydia (present-day Turkey) around2,700 years ago. Lydian coins didn’t look much like today’s coinage. Theywere irregular in shape and size and didn’t have values inscribed on them;instead, they used a stamped image to indicate their weight and value.The result, explains financial author Kabir Sehgal, was an economic systemin which “you knew the value of what you had, and what you could buy withit.” Unlike modern money, ancient coins were what economists call full-bodied or commo-dity money: Their value was fixed by the metal in them. 

Vocabulary

signify v.表示

transaction n.转账

commodity n.商品