Not property, or sexual partners, but the element Au, the metal gold?
Does anyone know at what point in human history gold itself became worth dying or killing for?
This site says as early as 4600 BC.
Yeah I saw that. I just wondered what the current consensus or discussion was, if any, because none of those answers are definitive. All pretty gray. Are there different schools of thought? I’m sure it’s not possible to name a day and date, but I was specifically interested in when gold became worth more than life, not when it became worth more than skins or spices. Again, not expecting a definitive answer; was hoping for more of discussion >> consensus.
I doubt you are going to find a definitive answer. Archaeologists rarely are in universal agreement about anything, and there will be different interpretations.
In early societies gold had symbolic value. It was used mainly for jewelry, buried with the dead to indicate high status. You could swap it but not really buy things with it.
It probably gained monetary value when it started being used for trade.
As I acknowledged above.
Y’know, just off the top of my head, I would suppose that before then, quite a few people were killed over who got skins and spices and herds and sexual partners. So for those already willing to kill for those things, once gold became a store of value useful for getting those things, it would have been an easy step.
I don’t think you CAN get a true GQ answer for “when did someone decide gold was more valuable than life”.
Agreed. It’s interesting to ponder when materials that have only symbolic value became more important than the stuff that had actual day to day usefulness and value. I kind of think if it as a step in evolution of the human mind thinking in metaphor.
I guess I’m not looking for a date so much as an idea of at what point in the evolution of the mind this change might have happened. What developments led up to it. Do you need language first, before you can think in metaphor? Or did metaphor, as in “I can trade this thing for a lot more stuff” lead to language?
My initial feeling was that the OP was nonsense, because even today, gold is NOT worth killing or dying for. But when you phrase it this way:
now the question is much more reasonable. I would suggest that the point you’re looking for is identical with the development of the concept of money, and the importance of materials that have only symbolic value.
Consider this version of your question: At what point were people willing to do work, or to give up useful things that they owned, in return for materials that had only symbolic value? The killing or dying is really irrelevant to what you’re asking, I suspect. I think you’re asking about the transition from “I’ll help you kill that animal if you let me have it’s leg” to “I’ll help you kill that animal if you give me that gold.”
Since typically most ancient tribes called themselves some version of “The People” and everyone else as some version of “those two-legged dogs”, we’ve probably been plundering enemy tribes since Cro-Magnon days.
The earliest known decorative use of gold seems to have been in Bulgaria.
I really like the Amarna Letters. A number of them go “Dear Pharaoh–I love you. A lot. Give me lots of gold.”
“Og find pretty rock”
“Thok want”
“No!”
grunt
grunt
Head caved in with club
An issue here is that when a material that seemingly has no day-to-day practical value becomes coveted for its symbolic value, it has acquired practical value. If certain quantity of gold can be traded for food in the same way that, say, a well-made & effective spear can be, both are comparably valuable.
Nor should decorative usages be disparaged. Men have always valued the favor of women, and have reliably found that gold, jewels, furs, etc. obtain it.
Another problem is that human life is valued at nothing to some people—indeed, less than nothing as it may be deemed a detriment in competition.
I think the answer @Colibri provides, therefore, gets closest to answering a more narrowly focused question along the lines of “At which point was gold considered so valuable that those with status—and therefore most able to sway their fellows to organized violence—routinely hoarded it for themselves?” Because anything else is like literally asking “at which point was gold valued as being worth more than ‘less than nothing,’ as some humans have considered their fellow humans to be throughout history and into the present day?” Bleak, but true.
This. Jokey as your answer is, from what little of my long ago anthropology classes I remember, it is spot on.
My recollection is that it was or is not at all uncommon for tribal groups to meet and exchange gifts. Those gifts were and are often trinkets, decorations etc ie not necessarily practical things at all. And fights over perceived slights because of who did and did not get a particular gift are/were commonplace.
I’d say a while before then - gold (and silver, and possibly iron) were used for trade before proper money was invented (and a millennium before the Amarna letters).
Well, considering people are killing people today for a few pieces of paper in their wallets, I would say they’ve been killing for something that is actually rare, and actually useful for other things and finite, goes waaaaay back.
I thought that Gold was one of the first metals to be used by humans as it was abundant near the surface, and so not particularly valuable just a convenient raw material to make asetically pleasing artifacts out of. At that point the gold itself was not worth murdering anyone over. It was only after society had exhausted that abundant gold on the surface it became the precious metal that people get shanked over.
It was never abundant, but it was one of the few metals to be found in its native form, and of those, the only one not to be oxidized/tarnished.