Barter, Commodity Money, and the Birth of Value in the Ancient World

Before Coins is the opening volume of The Money Chronicles, a ten-part history of money from the ancient world to today. This volume asks a deceptively simple question: what did people use as money before coins existed - and why?

The answer takes readers from the shell currencies that linked China, Africa, and the Pacific across thousands of miles of trade, through the salt roads of the Sahara and the cattle economies of East Africa, into the granaries and silver markets of Mesopotamia and Egypt, where the world's first writing system was invented not for poetry but for bookkeeping.

Along the way, this book challenges one of economics' most durable myths - that money arose to fix the inconvenience of barter - and replaces it with a better-documented story: money as a technology for measuring debt and obligation, built from whatever durable, trusted material a given society had at hand.

Featuring a full timeline, glossary, discussion questions, and further reading, Before Coins sets the stage for the invention of true coinage in Lydia, covered in Volume II.