Coins to Credit Cards, a Short History of Money: Neil MacGregor
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Oct. 26 (Bloomberg) -- We’ve all grown so accustomed tousing little round pieces of metal to buy things, it’s easy toforget that coins arrived quite late in the history of theworld. For more than 2,000 years, states ran complex economiesand international-trading networks without a coin to hand.
The Egyptians, for example, used a sophisticated systemthat measured value against standard weights of copper and gold.But as new states and new ways of organizing trade emerged about3,000 years ago, coinage began to make an appearance. Papermoney would not arrive for another couple of millenniums andcredit cards, not until the 20th century.