Friends Lunch with Member Gilles Bransbourg

Friends lunch with member poster

Friends Lunch with a Member: Gilles Bransbourg
Wednesday, January 29
12:15 p.m.
Simons Hall | Dilworth Room

In the Western Hemisphere, monetary exchanges have been documented in Mesopotamia and Egypt since the 3rd millennium BCE, using a variety of mediums such as barley, copper, silver, gold, dates, and wool. By the first millennium BCE, weighed silver had generally established itself as the primary monetary unit.

Lydia, a prosperous kingdom in western Asia Minor, began producing stamped pieces of electrum (an artificial alloy of gold and silver) in the late seventh century BCE, creating a denominational system based on tightly controlled weights. This was the birth of coinage. A century later, nearly two hundred Greek city-states and polities followed suit, opting for silver coins instead of gold or electrum.

Most economic historians present a seamless narrative, suggesting this was a natural evolution toward reducing transaction costs, with Greece in a uniquely advantageous position due to its city-states' inherently entrepreneurial culture.

However, regions like the Levant, including the Phoenician trading cities, Mesopotamia, and other advanced parts of the ancient world did not adopt coinage until much later. Even the Achaemenid Empire, which ruled a vast territory from Egypt to India, primarily minted coins for interactions with the Greek world. Coins did not significantly spread eastward, and when they did, they were weighed rather than counted.

Gilles will argue that the key difference between the Greek world and its highly developed neighbors was primarily political fragmentation. In the absence of central authorities capable of regulating and ensuring the trusted circulation of precious metals, Greek cities faced inconsistent silver quality from multiple sources. By stamping assayed, weighed, and locally guaranteed metallic objects, they effectively raised the threshold for counterfeiters.

While this was a step forward, it remained only a partial success. Fraud persisted on a significant scale and, as history has shown, continues to this day.

Register HERE to attend.