Under what conditions does a heavy, soft, useless (for anything but decorative purposes) metal become precious? Worth its very weight in honey or salt. Worth genocide?
Assuming a stone-age or even nomadic beginning, gold would be a liability–it’s heavy and doesn’t hold an edge very well, doesn’t add significantly to the flavor of food or even aid in it’s preservation…given the choice (and no interaction with someone else who valued it) it’d be suicidal to choose to tote around 10 pounds of gold as opposed to 10 pounds of salt. And yet, at some point, it looks like every culture that’s spent time being settled comes to value this stuff. What’s up?
I would have sworn I read a staff report in this. But I can’t find one now.
Anyway basically gold has the ideal features of a currency: rarity, uniqueness, durability and divisiblity. As a result it was an ideal currency.
You certainly could attempt to use salt as a currency, but it has a problem of not being particularly durable. The old proverb concerning salt that has lost its savour isn’t a joke. If you don’t store salt very carefully it gradually loses the more soluble ions and loses taste. That makes it useless as a way to store wealth. Even treasuries couldn’t readily store salt to keep it fresh and the common man certainly couldn’t bury salt in the back garden for safe keeping. The fact that salt can lose flavour and still look like salt also means that the currency can be easily watered. People discovered early on that gold I gold and it becomes noticably different in its properties and reactivity if it is bastardised. That isn’t true of salt, where I can mix large amounts of calcium chloride through your table salt without you noticing immediately.
Added to that salt isn’t rare. It is super-abundant but time consuming to extract. What that means is that as salt values increased there was more incentive for coastal people to extract salt and drive the currency down. That made for a very unstable currency, which would be added to precisely because salt is consumed when it is used. An army supplier could set out today with 100 camels’ worth of salt and when he arrives at the market he might only be able to afford 10 camels because salt has been devalued.
All other materials available to ancient societies also had failings that made them unsuitable as currency. Pearls are durable and hard to counterfeit, but indivisible. You can’t pay someone half a pearl because the act of cutting it devalues it. But you can pay someone an ounce of gold or a thousandth of an ounce without devaluing the material. Livestock or slaves might be valuable, but they decrease in value over time. Artworks might be durable but can be easily faked and so forth.
For a material to be useless as currency in ancient societies they needed to be rare, unique, durable and divisible. If any one of those features was lacking they weren’t a suitable currency. Ultimately what that meant was that metals were the only real currency option. And gold, being the rarest and most durable of the metals available became the currency standard, usually followed by silver for much the same reasons.
The actual process of currency adoption would have been fairly gradual and organic. Ones kings and chiefs started to value ostentatious wealth gold would immediately have acquired some value. And from there you get a positive feedback. Kings want gold to show off, so other kings want more gold. Other kings wanting gold creates market for gold that drives up prices making it even more valuable to kings wanting to show off. Almost immediately demand outstrips supply simply because it is rare. And because there is a constant demand for gold it becomes a very safe way to store wealth because you know you can sell it whenever you need and it never spoils and never radically devalues. And because it is a safe way to store wealth it becomes valuable for that reason alone, driving prices still higher, making it more attractive as a way of showing off showing off and even safer as way of storing wealth and even more valuable……
Other things about gold make it inevitable that primitive civilizations will value it very highly.
Among pure metals, gold is unique in its availability. While still rare, when it does occur in nature, it occurs in high purity, unlike most other metals. It is easily worked, and melts at an achievable temperature. It can be hammered into forms, and drawn into wires or beaten into thin sheets all without relying on metallurgical processing. When scratched on any slate surface, alloyed gold looks obviously different than pure gold. Alloying it with other metals makes it visibly different in color, causing it to be even more valuable as money.
All of what Blake wrote in his excellent post may be true, but I have a strong suspicion that if gold were an unattractive gray or brown color, all those other characteristics might not have been enough to make it such a useful form of money.
Surely it was gold’s almost otherworldly beauty that made anyone pay attention to it in the first place, seek it out, and discover all those other interesting qualities. These days, surrounded as we are by all sorts of shiny metal things, we may no longer fully appreciate the aesthetic qualities of gold as it appeared to our ancient ancestors. But imagine living thousands of years ago, when everything was natural colors like green, brown, and black, and almost nothing man-made was shiny. A glittering nugget of gold must have been like magic.
Add to that the fact that, unlike all other known metals, gold never rusted or tarnished. Like no other material known, it seemed to embody permanence, incorruptibility, and perfection. It was divine.
One thing about gold is that, though not of much practical use per se, it is eminently suited for use as money just because it is so rare. As soon as people started herding animals and conceived the ideas of property and ownership, gold would have obviously been a suitable monetary material because it was unlike anything else people knew, and so rare. You didn’t need pounds and pounds of it to represent the value of, say, a cow.
Well of course we can’t know but I suspect that you are describing an effect, not a cause. Gold is polished and shiny precisely because it is valuable. As others have pointed out gold in the form of nuggets or even exposed reefs is nowhere near as attractive or shiny as common quartz. Some is, but not all. People took a lot of time and effort to make most gold attractive and shiny.
And any substance that is even moderately durable will become attractive when polished. Polished wood, polished rocks and even polished coal are all just as beautiful as gold and each unique and just as ‘otherworldly’ in their own way as gold. But none of those things became currency because they lack gold’s other properties.
Similarly the incorruptibility of gold is one of the key factors that makes it suitable as a currency. Even without needing to invoke the psuedo-spiritual value you assume people placed on gold incorruptibility it is a valuable trait simply because it allows gold to be stored and transported with great ease. In contrast copper or iron needs constant care and special storage or the treasury will one day be filled with nothing but rust and verdigris.
Maybe incorruptibility also added to the aesthetic appeal of gold, but it is essential for its currency value.
This doesn’t make sense to me. Table salt is sodium chloride. That’s it - two elements. When dissolved in water it divides into positively charged sodium ions and negatively charged chlorine ions. What is it that’s lost due to improper storage - sodium? Chlorine? Are you saying that one element will drift away, leaving an overabundance of the other?
Modern table salt is mostly sodium chloride. Salt in primitive societies, which is what we are discussing of course, is either sea salt or rock salt, not table salt.
Sea salt is only around 85% sodium chloride even if fully and properly distilled from evaporated seawater. A lot of primitive processing techniques used incomplete evaporation techniques because they were faster and cheaper. Of course incomplete evaporation means that the less water soluble magnesium and potassium salts precipitated out first and were collected in preference to the more desirable sodium. As result traditional sea salt was often 75% or less NaCl.
Rock salt could be (and often still is) even less pure, with various sulfates like gypsum or even borates contaminating the material depending on how and where it was collected
When your table salt is less than 75% ‘salt’ and you lose even 25% of that through leaching, the remaining salts are going to be bland. And if you add enough to bring back the taste the calcium and pottasium salts start to function as a laxative.
So it’s not a case of one element drifting away. It’s a case of one chemical, the most water soluble, drifting away and leaving an overabundance of the other largely taseless salts behind. Salt stored in unglazed jars or skins would gradually absorb water from the air, the sodium chloride, being the most soluble, would dissolve first and leach away through the skin or porcelain leaving the other salts behind.
People like jewelry. As long as people like jewelry, there will always be a market for the things they make jewelry out of - gold, silver, gemstones. As long as there is a market for these things, these things will have value. It’s as simple as that.
Aside from its esthetics, gold is also useful because it doesn’t tarnish. Gold plating is a good way of preserving surfaces (for instance, in modern times electrical contacts), so gold cups, etc. actually make sense practically.
Even a poorly-maintained piece of brass (like, say, a high school marching band’s tuba) is glossier and shinier than a polished piece of gold. And while brass might not date quite as far back in antiquity as gold, it’s still pretty darned old.
Do you have a cite to say that gold was used as a currency before it was used as jewellery? According to a very cursorary google, Gold Jewellery has been around since 3000BC while gold coins have only been around since 640BC. Of course, it’s perfectly possible for there to be money without coinage but, unless further evidence is presented, it seems reasonable to me that gold was first used in the decorative sense.
And the reason for that seems rather simple. Gold is rare, hard to fake and pretty. Polished coal might also be pretty but it’s too common for this purpose. Gold acts as a status symbol and a representation of wealth and power.
Why would I have? I said exactly the opposite in my very first post. I stated quite clearly that gold would only have become valuable as a currency after it achieved value as a status symbol.
Because it does nothing to answer the OP? If the reason why gold became precious was as a status symbol, then surely the answer to the OP is that gold became precious as a status symbol. Even if money were never invented, gold would still be precious.
No. I suggest perhaps you go back and re-readthe OP. The question was why gold became more valuable other precious materials such as salt, and why someone would thus choose to travel with gold rather than an equal weight of salt. That was the question asked by the OP.
If money were never inventred gold would still be precious, but I believe you are confusing gold as money with gold as a trade standard and welth store. As I pointed out above if gold didn’t have those properties that makes it suitable as a trade standard and wealth store then it would have been less valuable than pearls or diamonds or land, or slaves or salt which have all been status symbols in their time but never acheived the same value as gold.
Without all the features that make it more utilitarian as a trade standard and godl store there is no explanation for the actual quetsion asked, which is why gold became more valuable than salt. Salt was equally a status symbol in early societies.
I would argue that tied to gold’s preservation, easy divisability and scarcity factors, it is its very uselessness that MAKES it such good currency.
What you are essentially arguing for is that “Gold has little use, therefore why is it a universal symbol of wealth”. Look at the alternative. Imagine if gold were used in, say, weaponry. Or tools. Or whatever (and in large amounts, not just the trace elements that are used in watches, computers, whatever). No one would want to use it to trade, because as soon as they got some money they’d melt it down to make it into something useful.
Essentially, gold is not valuable in and of itself- but it makes an excellent method to simplify barter.
eeemm… i may be incorrect but i dont think so… gold is very far from useless. especially nowadays. aside from being so chemically unreactive and therefore unlikely to rust away to nothing it is both the most ductile and malleable metal in the world. gold is used in all sorts of tight space electrical jobs as it can be drawn into a tighter wire than any other metal. which is why it is used on most space craft. plus it can be hammered or rolled in to sheets so thin that they are see-through making it a very effeciant sun visor.
also its such a good conductor of heat that it is used to line the engine cavity of the maclaren f1 roadster, formerly the most expensive car in the world.
and i understand that the context of this thread was “in times long ago” but that is still not to say that gold is a “useless but pretty” metal
