Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

Actually, one theory is that the very first Lydian coins were invented explicitly to pay mercenaries.11 This might help explain why the Greeks, who supplied most of the mercenaries, so quickly became accustomed to the use of coins, and why the use of coinage spread so quickly across the Hellenic world, so that by 480 BC there were at least one hundred mints operating in different Greek cities, even though at that time, none of the great trading nations of the Mediterranean had as yet showed the slightest interest in them. The Phoenicians, for example, were considered the consummate merchants and bankers of antiquity.12 They were also great inventors, having been the first to develop both the alphabet and the abacus. Yet for centuries after the invention of coinage, they preferred to continue conducting business as they always had, with unwrought ingots and promissory notes.13 Phoenician cities struck no coins until 365 BC, and while Carthage, the great Phoenician colony in North Africa that came to dominate commerce in the Western Mediterranean, did so a bit earlier, it was only when “forced to do so to pay Sicilian mercenaries; and its issues were marked in Punic, ‘for the people of the camp.’ ”14 On the other hand, in the extraordinary violence of the Axial Age, being a “great trading nation” (rather than, say, an aggressive military power like Persia, Athens, or Rome) was not, ultimately, a winning proposition. The fate of the Phoenician cities is instructive. Sidon, th...