Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Metallurgy was quite sophisticated from early on. Welding, nails and rivets were early inventions, in use from 3000 BC. Gold plating began as early as the third millennium, soon followed by the lost-wax technique, for making bronze sculptures.⁸⁴ In terms of ideas, three uses to which metals were put seem to have been most profound. These were the dagger, as was mentioned earlier, the mirror, and coins. Mirrors were particularly popular among the Chinese, and the Romans excelled at making them, finding that an alloy of 23–28 per cent tin, 5–7 per cent lead, and the rest copper, served best. Reflections were later considered to be linked to man’s soul.⁸⁵

Money does not occur in nature, says the historian Jack Weatherford. Jules Renard, the nineteenth-century French writer, put it another way: ‘I finally know what distinguishes man from the other beasts: financial worries.’ The first forms of money were commodity money, ranging from salt to tobacco, coconuts to rice, reindeer to buffaloes. The English word ‘salary’ derives from the Latin salarius, meaning ‘of salt’. (Roman soldiers were perhaps paid in salt, to flavour their otherwise bland food.⁸⁶) The as, a Roman coin, represented the value of one hundredth of a cow. The English word ‘cattle’ is derived from the same Latin root as the word ‘capital’. As early as the third millennium BC, however, the inhabitants of Mesopotamia began using ingots of precious metals in exchange for goods. The ingots, of gold or silver and of uniform weight, were called minas or shekels or talents.⁸⁷

The transition from proto-money to coins proper took place in Lydia, in what is now Turkey, some time between 640 and 630 BC. The very first coins were made of electrum, a naturally occurring mixture of gold and silver, and they were about the size of a thumb nail, and almost as thick as a thumb, like a small ingot. They were stamped with a lion’s head, to ensure their authenticity, and the stamping had the effect of flattening them, making them more like the coins that we use today.⁸⁸ Whether the first coins were used exactly as we use money now is open to doubt. The first coins would have been so valuable they could never have been anything like ‘change’. The main breakthrough, to commodification, probably came with the introduction of bimetallic coinages, gold and silver and/or copper. This may have been introduced in the third or second centuries BC, when they were used to pay people in Greece who had been selected for political office by ballot (see Chapter 6).

But the eventual change in life that the invention of money brought about was momentous. It was in a Lydian city, Sardis, that the first retail market was introduced, when anyone could come to the market and sell, for money, whatever they had. In the archaeological record the oldest traded material is obsidian, a very fine, jet-black and shiny volcanic glass, which was mined at a single source in southern Turkey but was found all over the Middle East, where its transparent, reflective, super-cutting properties made it magical and much sought after.⁸⁹ But all sorts of new activities were sparked by the invention of money. At Sardis, for instance, the first known brothels were built, and gambling was also born.⁹⁰ More fundamentally, the advent of money enabled people to break out from their kin group. Money became the link between people, creating a nexus that had not been possible under the barter system. In the same way, money weakened traditional ties and that, in time, had profound political implications. Work and human labour became a commodity, with a coin-related value attached, and therefore time too could be measured in the same way.