Civic and temple origins of Greek coinage

Michael Hudson

Chapter 2 in The Elgar Companion to Modern Money Theory, 2024, pp 22-34 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: The civic-temple origins of ancient coinage were well known but ignored by the late 19th-century’s advocates of the commodity-barter myth of money’s origins. Civic authorities in Greece and Rome followed the Near Eastern practice of assigning to temples the role of minting monetary metals in standardized amounts and overseeing their quality, with coins being minted by temples starting early in the sixth century BC in Greece and Asia Minor. The innovation of coinage was not transformative, but 19th-century historians believed that it catalyzed the debt struggles that erupted throughout the Mediterranean world around this time. What actually caused the social revolts and long string of political murders from the fifth through first centuries BC was the refusal of oligarchies to grant the citizenry’s demands for land redistribution and debt cancelation, which Near Eastern rulers had been enacting for some 2,500 years.

Keywords: Economics and Finance; Politics and Public Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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