Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

After the first coins were minted around 600 BC in the kingdom of Lydia, the practice quickly spread to Ionia, the Greek cities of the adjacent coast. The greatest of these was the great walled metropolis of Miletus, which also appears to have been the first Greek city to strike its own coins. It was Ionia, too, that provided the bulk of the Greek mercenaries active in the Mediterranean at the time, with Miletus their effective headquarters. Miletus was also the commercial center of the region and, perhaps, the first city in the world where everyday market transactions came to be carried out primarily in coins instead of credit.71 Greek philosophy, in turn, begins with three men: Thales, of Miletus (c. 624 BC–c. 546 BC), Anaximander, of Miletus (c. 610 BC–c. 546 BC), and Anaximenes, of Miletus (c. 585 BC–c. 525 BC)—in other words, men who were living in that city at exactly the time that coinage was first introduced.72 All three are remembered chiefly for their speculations on the nature of the physical substance from which the world ultimately sprang. Thales proposed water, Anaximenes, air. Anaximander made up a new term, apeiron, “the unlimited,” a kind of pure abstract substance that could not itself be perceived but was the material basis of everything that could be. In each case, the assumption was that this primal substance, by being heated, cooled, combined, divided, compressed, extended, or set in motion, gave rise to the endless particular stuffs and substances th...