Money History
For hundreds of thousands of years, human civilizationstended to barter for goods, trading shells and preciousstones for food and other important commodities. Forthe first evidence of money as currency, we need to goback 5,000 years to where modern-day Iraq now sits, tofind ‘the shekel’. Though this was the first form ofcurrency, it was not money as we know and understandit today. It actually represented a certain weight ofbarley, a kind of plant, equivalent to gold or silver.Eventually, the shekel became a coin currency in itsown right. In much the same way, Britain’s currency iscalled ‘the pound’, because it was originally equivalentto a pound of silver. The ancient Greeks and Romansused gold and silver coins as currency, with the Latin‘denarius’ ultimately giving birth to ‘dinar’ in variouscountries including Jordan and Algeria, and providingthe ‘d’ that served as an abbreviation for the Britishpenny before decimalization in 1971. It also gives us theword for money in Spanish and Portuguese – ‘dinero’and ‘dinhero’. The first ever banknotes were issued in7th-century China, though it took another 1,000 yearsbefore the idea of paper money was adopted in Europe,by Sweden’s Stockholms Banco in 1661