Long before stamped metal appeared in Lydia in the late seventh century BCE, people priced, paid and saved using standards that everyone could read: weights and measures, commodities valued by agreed equivalences, and accounts inscribed on durable media. Temples and palaces set the yardsticks, households and workshops used them, and merchants carried value across deserts and seas with trusted units of account, balances and pledges. This guide shows what “money” meant in that world: how prices were stated, how payments cleared, how trust travelled, and how daily life worked without coinage.
Money without coins: the functions, not the form
To see money before coins, separate functions, not materials. One thing could be used to reckon value, another to store it, a third to transfer it, and a fourth to signal status.
Unit of account (a language for prices): In much of Mesopotamia, officials reckoned in fixed weights of silver and fixed volumes of barley (alongside oil and wool for rations). In Egypt, scribes used the deben as a weight-yardstick with smaller units like the kite, so an axe, a tunic and a jar of oil could be priced in the same terms even when no metal changed hands. In the Indus Valley, standard chert weights in neat series made beam scales decisive. In Shang-era China, cowrie shells circulated as prized media and were later copied in bronze. Around the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean, copper moved as ingots, including the distinctive “oxhide” form, priced by weight and purity.
Means of exchange (what settled a deal): measured grain, parcels of wool, worked metal, or an entry in a ledger that cleared a debt. Store of value: sealed jars of oil, coils of textiles, hacksilver weighed on demand, or chests of shells. Portability, divisibility and stable quality helped, but above all there had to be trust in the scale, the weight, the stated quality and whoever guaranteed them.
How standards made value legible
Prices only work if everyone understands the units. Early states invested heavily in standardisation: stable weight-systems, trained officials, and standards embedded in artefacts and habits.
Weights and measures were visible. Administrators held decorated weights—ducks, lions, gazelles—that were both tools and symbols. Merchants used portable sets: stone cubes in the Indus, marked metal pieces in the Near East. Temple and palace stores kept beam balances ready. Public life was full of measuring acts: weighing ingots, checking cloth with cords, gauging grain in standard baskets, reading notches on jars. Once people agree that one shekel of silver equals a set volume of barley in a normal year, price comparison becomes everyday arithmetic.
Standards were performative. Weights carried names of kings or high officials. Scales stood in administrative rooms. Scribes set accounts on tablets and potsherds in crisp columns. The message was simple: value is something the state can measure.
Silver by weight, grain by measure
No society used a single yardstick. In palace and temple economies two anchors recur.
Silver by weight served as a universal reckoning unit. Officials could write that a delivery, a fine or a bridewealth equalled so many shekels or minas, even when settlement happened in goods. When silver changed hands, it did so as hacksilver or cut pieces weighed on a balance, not as coins. Texts stress quality (“good silver”), implying assaying by sound, cut or experience.
Grain by measure governed rations, rents and much wholesale provisioning. Ledgers logged barley in standard measures (for example the gur and local equivalents), and officials balanced inflows from estates with outflows to workers and dependants. Where a state taxed in kind and paid in kind, grain functioned as both salary and budget.
These two yardsticks converted at published equivalences that could drift with harvests and politics. The absence of coinage did not mean the absence of prices. It meant prices were stated against standards, then settled by measured substance or by clearing accounts.
Work, wages and rations
Early kingdoms combined rations, allotments and wage-like payments. A crew cutting canal banks or hauling timbers might receive daily rations of grain and beer, plus periodic distributions of oil and wool for clothing. Skilled workers could receive extra shares or bonuses: more barley, a portion of meat at feast times, or a weighed piece of metal when a task ended. Overseers recorded the exchange in tidy lists: names, days worked, quantities issued. The logic is familiar: time for goods, logged and cross-checked.
Wages in kind did not exclude debt in money of account. A worker might borrow a few shekels’ worth of barley at sowing and repay after harvest at an agreed rate. Reputation mattered. Temples and palaces acted as credit hubs; householders and merchants sponsored neighbours. Even without coins, the mathematics of obligation ran on.
Bulky value: metals and ingots
Metal moved value through space. Copper and tin made bronze, the signature alloy of tools and weapons; copper alone served in fittings and vessels. Because ore and expertise clustered, metal had to travel down rivers, across sea lanes and over portages. At market, it arrived in standard forms: cakes, bars and the famous oxhide ingots with corner grips that could be slung or stacked. These shapes were not decorative. They let merchants count and weigh quickly, store efficiently and cut to size.
Archaeology shows these forms aboard trading ships and in coastal depots. The logic is clear: a portable, divisible, widely recognised material valued by weight served as both store of value and means of exchange for bulk trade. Price still lived on the balance; the ingot simplified the journey from mine and furnace to market and workshop.
Trust, seals and the grammar of assurance
Exchange needed more than materials. It needed assurance that weights were honest, quality genuine and promises kept. Early kingdoms built overlapping layers of trust.
- Seals and sealing. Cylinder and stamp seals secured jars, baskets and doors. A rolled scene or emblem in clay identified who packed it, who checked it and where it went; a broken seal left a visible scar.
- Named and calibrated weights. A duck or lion weight inscribed with a ruler’s name or title signalled official oversight. Merchants could challenge a crooked balance by appealing to the standard engraved in metal or stone.
- Receipts and accounts. Tablets made memory portable. A scribe could issue a note for goods taken and another on return to close the loop. Rather than haul silver around, people moved promises and balances, backed by reputations and by institutions willing to enforce them.
- Qualified materials. Texts specify “good” or “refined” silver, wool of a grade, oil of a purity. Where quality is defined, it can be tested; where it is tested, value moves between strangers.
Barter: myth and reality
It is tempting to imagine simple barter—ox for pots, cloak for knife—slowly growing into coinage. That picture misleads. Barter occurred, especially in face-to-face local exchange and emergencies, but the normal economy of early kingdoms ran on reckoning and obligation. Prices in weight-silver and measured grain let people compare without direct swaps. Debts and credits let people separate payment in time from delivery in space. Coins did not invent pricing. They formalised portable standard units and state-backed guarantees when such portability became worth the cost.
Textiles, shells and other stores of value
Sources emphasise metal and grain, but other media mattered.
- Textiles. Fine cloth condensed labour and skill. Rolls appear in marriage settlements and treaty payments as transferable value, often listed alongside metal and oil.
- Shells. Cowries served as recognised media in early China and beyond. Durable, portable and distinctive, they handled payments large and small. Later bronze cowries show how an organic medium could be standardised in metal without becoming stamped coinage.
- Vessels. Bronze bowls, jugs and tripods appear in gift lists and inventories. Their weight and recognisable form mattered most; capacity marks tied them to standards, turning pretty objects into calibrated ones.
Long-distance circuits
Exchange systems were never provincial. Indus, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Levantine and Aegean worlds interlocked. Standard weights let goods and obligations cross cultural lines. A merchant from the Gulf could settle at a Levantine port because a balance and a set of weights built a bridge between languages. Seals and documents helped; so did shared measures for bulk goods such as amphora capacities, jar stamps and standard baskets.
Shipwrecks add a cross-section to texts. Cargoes show mixed loads: metal ingots, jars of resins or oil, raw glass, fine wares for gifting and ballast. These are not random piles. They are portfolios of value moving between courts, temples and towns. Some items would be weighed, others counted or poured. All had a place in the arithmetic of payment and promise.
Measuring people, measuring things
Money before coins registered not only things but people. Fines and compensations were stated in weight-silver; bridewealth and dowry in textiles, metal and livestock; oaths and contracts specified what would happen if promises failed. The very act of writing a tablet or binding a seal made people legible to institutions.
Weights, balances and records appear in iconography because they were part of how power showed itself. A ruler who “sets the balance right” signalled justice and economic competence. When a kingdom claimed to “fix the standard”, it did political work—announcing a public language for private deals.
Why coinage emerges
Coinage did not replace these systems overnight. For centuries after the first stamped electrum pieces in Lydia, people still weighed metal, stated prices in weight-silver and measure-grain, and settled much of life in kind. Coins were a state technology for specific problems: rapid payment to soldiers and officials far from storehouses, tax collection in portable form, branding value to ease circulation among strangers, and fractioning precious metal into units small enough for daily purchases.
Coinage presupposed everything already in place: weights, balances, assayers, standards and scribes. The die-stamp added an image of authority and a promise of purity and weight backed by a mint. It solved the costs of testing and trust when exchange widened and quickened.
How scholars rebuild the system
The quiet revolution is methodological. Researchers pair texts with things. An account tablet speaks properly only next to the jars, baskets and measures it names. A duck weight becomes more than a curiosity when matched to a known series. A ship’s ingots make economic sense when priced by the ledger language of a corresponding port. Imaging recovers faint writing; metallurgy and residue analyses tell what goods were and how they moved; spatial studies of storerooms and workshops reveal flows of value through built environments.
Across cultures, the pattern holds. Before coins, money was the discipline of measure and the habit of reckoning—practices that made obligations translatable at distance, auditable over time and enforceable by institutions that claimed to watch the scales.
Key terms
Unit of account. The standard used to state prices (for example shekel, mina, deben, gur). Means of exchange. What a community accepts for settlement (for example grain by measure, metal by weight, ledger entries). Store of value. A form that keeps value for later use (for example oil, textiles, hacksilver). Hacksilver. Cut pieces of silver paid and received by weight. Deben / kite. Egyptian weight units. Oxhide ingot. A standard copper bar with corner grips. Sealings. Impressions in clay that mark identity and control.
Sources and further reading
- Administrative and ration tablets from Late Uruk and later Mesopotamian archives (units of account; rations and wages).
- Egyptian weight systems (deben, kite) and marked weights in museum collections.
- Indus Valley chert weight series and beam-balance finds (standardisation in trade).
- Uluburun shipwreck cargo (oxhide ingots; mixed loads as portfolios of value).
- Shang and Western Zhou use of cowries and bronze cowries (shell money as medium and model).
Notes on terminology: “Unit of account” is the price language; “reckoning” means expressing value in that language even when settlement is in goods; “published equivalences” refers to the official rates used to convert, which could shift with harvests and policy.
