Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

The world’s first coins appear to have been created within the kingdom of Lydia, in western Anatolia (now Turkey), sometime around 600 BC.5 These first Lydian coins were basically just round lumps of electrum—a gold-silver alloy that occurred naturally in the nearby Pactolus River—that had been heated, then hammered with some kind of insignia. The very first, stamped only with a few letters, appear to have been manufactured by ordinary jewelers, but these disappeared almost instantly, replaced by coins manufactured in a newly established royal mint. Greek cities on the Anatolian coast soon began to strike their own coins, and they came to be adopted in Greece itself; the same thing occurred in the Persian Empire after it absorbed Lydia in 547 BC.