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Lydia And The Stater
Lydia was an empire that began in 1200 BC and was conquered by the Persians around 546 BC. It covered the modern Western Anatolia, Salihli, Manisa, and Turkey before the Persians took it. One of their most important contributions to the modern world was the first state sponsored coinage, in 700BC. Many of the coins were electrum, which is a mix of gold and silver.
And here’s the most important part. The standard weight was guaranteed by an official stamp. The Lydian king Croesus then added the concept of bimetallic coinage. Or having one coin made of gold and the other of silver. Each had a different denomination where the lower denomination was one dozen of the higher. They then figured out a way to keep counterfeit coins off the market with a Lydian stone, the color of which could be compared to other marks made by gold coins. And thus modern coinage was born. And the Lydian merchants became the merchants that helped move goods between Greece and Asia, spreading the concept of the coin. Cyrus the second defeated the Lydians and Darius the Great would issue the gold daric, with a warrior king wielding a bow. And so heads of state began to adorn coins.
Before The Stater
As with most things in antiquity, there are claims (and many are accurate according to the context) that China or India introduced coins first. Bronzed shells have been discovered in the ruins of Yin, the old capital of the Shang dynasty dating back hundreds of years before the Lydians introduced the Stater. Thus, the Stater wasn’t likely an innovative new approach to the transfer of wealth but an evolution in how wealth transfered. There were Mesopotamian tablets in Uruk, a city in modern Iraq, thousands of years before that. Yet the Stater represents a culmination of these in an empire that sat at the junction point between Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Uruk is a city on the banks of the Euphrates river, in the cradle of civilization. Sea levels were higher when the first people settled in the area. People had been farming for over 5,000 years by the time Uruk became what we know the city to have been. Climates changed and the water levels fell. Populations from surrounding farming communities moved into the city states in the fertile crescent and cities like Ur, Lagash, Kish, Nippur, Uruk, Assur, Babylon, and Akkad became city-states. These grew into some of the first cities between 5,500 BCE and 4,000 BCE. As their populations swelled, they had to come up with new innovative ways to replace family structures that dominated villages that often didn’t eclipse a population of 150 people. The earliest human texts were developed in the period between 3,500 BCE and 3,000 BCE. Many of the clay tablets were used to take a symbol, which a word might otherwise describe, and put it onto a tablet. This became the basis for writing. They were standardized but some were shaped like jars, others like loaves, and others animals. They were tracking possessions with written symbols.
Symbols had been used to count going back to 16,000 years before that in the Congo. Those were tally sticks. The idea had evolved in the previous couple of thousand years, based on objects found in modern Turkey and Pakistan. But this was a clear accounting system. Wealth was being tracked. The population had swelled to 50,000 people at the height of Uruk, and that meant specialists and wealth. Indeed, the first epic was about a King of Uruk in Mesopotamia. The Epic of Gilgamesh was written over a thousand years later, some time between 2,150 and 1,400 BCE. By then, language had matured beyond pictographs, which happened in Mesopomia between 3,400 BCE and 3,100 BCE, around the beginning of the stone age. Writing flowed to Egypt shortly afterwards , to China around 1,200 BCE, and was independently discovered in the Americas in 500 BCE. In most cases, this coincided with larger and larger population centers that needed to account. The Olmecs carved images of animals and plants. As with in Egypt, the pictures of symbols evolved into glyphs.
Abstracting The Idea Of Wealth
Writing allowed humanity to persist ideas. Words instead of pictures allowed humans to look at language and thought in new ways. In this same way, an accounting of assets on clay tablets later evolved to clay that represented specific objects and then over time to coins, with the Stater. Bimetallic systems and tiers of wealth evolved from there, just as tiers of humans were split into casts when specialists from minority groups seized power over increasingly centralized population centers. Before farming there was not real notion of wealth. Foragers (hunters and gatherers) didn’t need it. The Mesopotamian cities and others around the world emerged to harness more energy from nature, and the safety of that energy became abstracted into posessions like property, crops, livestock, and other goods. That property was again abstracted into wealth through coins.
Paper currency emerged during the Tang dynasty in China, likely between the last half of the 600s CE and 800 CE. Now metalic wealth was abstracted from metalurgic wealth, which was itself an abstraction of property. Where the flow of energy from plants to animals to humans saw the food chain as a pyramid that went up to apex predators, the abstractions to acquire that energy was the opposite.
Bazaars had emerged in Persia, where cities swelled around 3,000 BCE and spread throughout the known world. The coins that became an abstraction of wealth allowed trading empires to grow even larger. Trade was risky. The Persians built longer and longer roads to facilitate the flow of trade and once coins were introduced, abstractions in trade evolved over the next couple thousand years to include banking when the Knights Templar added the concept of bank notes to the abstraction of wealth. By the 1,100s CE, farmers in France traded in debts, sometimes with banks. Eventually the government had to step in to regulate those debts. Debts, and indeed money, were secured by property, and by the 1,200s maarkets in Venice allowed people to trade in those securities. Much as the Lydian Stater was stamped with the seal of the ruler to regulate the coins, the new markets had to be regulated. Bank notes were easier to transport and arguably more secure, but could be lost. So bank accounts evolved from just notes.
From There To Here
Companies began to grow beyond familial controls. Italian companies in the next century began to abstract ownership, thus sharing risks and rewards. This meant others could buy stock in those companies. Others began to trade in stocks and over the next few centries the modern stock markets began to emerge. Meanwhile, throughout the history of wealth building that emerged since the early days of agrarian economies, about 90 percent of the wealth was heald by about 10 percent of the people. The more information and the more abstractions of that wealth, the more ways there were to control its distribution.
Control of wealth hasn’t changed much in the millineas since we’re able to understand wealth distribution. 90 percent of wealth in ancient empires was controlled by about 10% of the population, a number that has shifted to 10% who control 85% of wealth in the world by 2,000. But the bottom half of the socioeconomic only controls 1 percent, globally. In the United States, the top 20% owns 85%, far less than the global average.
Given all the abstractions to the concept of wealth, the difference in the quality of life based on wealth concentration are quite different in modern economies than in ancient and developing economies. The transfer of energy from photosynthesis to plants to humans and animals – and through animals to amplify work on behalf of humans and feed humans meant that less people had to work the land. Each abstraction of wealth seems to make it appear as though wealth is more evenly distributed. The Gini index, or Gini coefficient, was developed to track inequality of income (which isn’t synonymous with wealth but close enough) by Corrado Gini in 1912. That number increased steadily from .43 in 1820 to .8 in 1988 but has steadily declined to .65 since.
Many of the highest coefficients are in African and South American countries. Many of the lowest are in social democracies across Europe. The United States maintaines a .41, while the poverty rates remain the the teens. Poverty and wealth distribution mean something vastly different in developed countries than they do elsewhere. The bottom of the wealth inequality pyramid globally can still barely subsist, globally. Yet the gap betwen the wealthy and the bourgeois and proletariat has shrunk. Some comforts and basic services are consumed similarly by each. Supermarkets and apps now provide service on demand so we can use our obfuscation of wealth to buy energy flows. We can summon a carriage to drive us around for a few Staters, or deliver a pizza for a few. Ironically, though, the Gini index is far less in social democracies and between the US and those in communist countries like China, witha. 38.2 and 38 in Russia. In order words the ideas of Marx were taken more seriously in Nordic and Eastern/Central European nations. But that’s because they aren’t just subverting the concepts to keep strong men in power.
Happiness, Power, And Stasis
The term strongmen is used in anthropology and poltiical science to describe the types of leaders like Croesus from Lydia was. When Croesus, who amassed a vast wealth, asked Salon who the happiest man in the world, Solon responded that it could not be Croesus, as fortune is fickle. Croecus built his wealth on subjugation and as such, was subjugated when Lydia was conquered by the Persians. The common people probably didn’t notice much, once the fires burned down. After all, someone had to convert energy flows from nature into the flow of wealth to help Cyrus go on to conquer other lands. And his descendants were conquered by the Greeks who were conquered by the Romans. Yet the coinage persisted in the form of the Persian daric and spread through successive empires or by trade. Just as new forms of government did, throughout the agricultural empires and into the age of steam and electronics.
Empires once grew by conquering others through sheer military might. The Mongols, Romans, Persians, British, and Russian empires had to grow to maintain that inertia. Since World War II, a new order has taken shape where empires grow through economy and surplus goods that can be distributed to influence, rather than coerce other nations. The energy of the cosmos is converted with greater efficiency than ever before. Knowledge is more readily available than at any point in history. That knowledge allows us to continue to find new ways to amplify our work to convert energy into goods and indeed wealth. It also makes that conversion accessible to anyone in the digital era. Doing so still erquires humans.
If nations do not grow through coercion, they still need the inertia of those built by conquerers. Now that inertia comes from people who cross borders to live in wealthier countries. The nations need the population growth and new ideas those people bring with them. Borders need to be semi-permeable, like the walls of cells or the atmosphere of planets. After all, nations, stars, and cells are ecosystems in and of themselves, and work in similar ways. Those who want to restrict the flow of humans into a nation claim that immigrants are a drain on the economy – which is false. When people make false claims they are trying to control the flow of wealth in inorganic ways. As the ghost of Croesus could tell anyone willing to listen, or those who suffered in Alexandria after the great library was burned, or people from any fallen empire – the inertia can’t last forever because societies suffer as much from the second law of thermodynamics as any physics experiment might. The natural tendency of isolated systems is to degenerate into a more disordered state. That’s why stable structures in physics account for entropy, like a large gas engine releasing its exhaust through a turbine.
Or at least this is the world as we know it today. The third law of thermodynamics could apply to civilizations as well. Here we encounter the unattainability principal, as we near zero entropy, it becomes increasingly difficult to do so. However, given that progress depends on the efficient use of energy, humanity seeks to cut waste from the transition of energy. Globalization put the world on an assembly line, with each step paid for with the mdoern form of the Stater. If systems are pure – or in stasis, they are less chaotic, and so with less moving parts we have less energy lost – less Staters have to change hands between each change of matter. Further, there’s less inequality between the lattices of human hierarchy. It’s still an issue, but when the rule of law actually regulates predatory behavior (rather than just being weaponized by various minority groups in power), inching closer to stasis is inevitable.
