The first pan-European currency may have existed more than 2800 years ago in the Bronze Age. There were no coins yet and no central bank, but people across Europe used fragments of bronze 鈥� the majority of which were either a standard mass or a multiple of that.
鈥淵ou can actually think of some monetary union in Europe without public institutions,鈥� says Nicola Ialongo at the University of G枚ttingen in Germany.
Bronze is an alloy of copper and other metals, usually tin, that was used widely in Europe from about 2300 BC to 800 BC 鈥� hence the term Bronze Age. This widespread access to those metals must have involved trade.
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For one thing, 鈥渃opper is not very common鈥�, says Ialongo. It was mined at several sites including in the Eastern Alps. A new study shows that it was also being smelted in what is now eastern Serbia between 2000 and 1500 BC, more than 500 years earlier than thought.
Tin is even harder to find: Ialongo describes it as 鈥渋ncredibly rare鈥�. It was extracted in what is now Cornwall in the south-west of England, and there were also sites in eastern Europe and Turkey, says Ialongo. 鈥淚t鈥檚 really difficult to get access to tin and yet it was everywhere.鈥�
This continent-spanning trade was the ideal situation for a unified form of money to arise, he says. This was made possible by the spread of weighing technology such as balance scales, which were invented around 3000 BC between Mesopotamia and Egypt and subsequently spread throughout Europe. The weights were often made of stone and the balance beam of bone or antler. Weighing scales meant people could determine the value of a commodity in a more objective way.
Ialongo and his colleague Giancarlo Lago of Sapienza University of Rome in Italy, studied more than 3000 fragments of bronze from Bronze Age sites scattered around Europe. The fragments had been broken off larger objects, potentially from things like such as axe heads.
If the fragments were being used as money, they should have been standardised. While they didn鈥檛 look alike, as modern coins do, they should have had regular masses. There should have been a single smallest mass, the equivalent of a single penny or cent. The larger fragments should have been multiples of this mass.
Ialongo and Lago found that the fragments conformed to such a rule. The smallest ones weighed about 9.8 grams, and larger ones were multiples of that. That closely matched the balance weights, where the smallest ones were typically 9.6 grams.
鈥淚 found that very convincing,鈥� says Joanne Baron at the Bard Early College Network in Newark, New Jersey. While standardisation by itself isn鈥檛 proof that the fragments were used as currency, the fact that they become more numerous over time bolsters the case, she says.
This European currency arose despite the lack of a single central government, and before Europeans learned to write. The question, says Baron, is whether the small organised groups that did exist played a role in the standardisation of the money. Economists often assume that people invented money to make it easier to trade items of different values, but some anthropologists argue that its origin really lies with governments taxing their citizens and setting a standard means of payment.
Baron has studied the emergence of money in the ancient Mayan society, and concluded that 鈥渋t鈥檚 sort of both鈥�. Expanding economies give individual households incentive to produce items that are readily exchanged, she says. 鈥淏ut then also the state then does start charging taxes in those same specific commodities鈥�, creating a feedback cycle.
Journal references: Journal of Archaeological Science, DOI: , DOI:
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