The el-Amarna Hoard
From el-Amarna, Egypt
18th
Dynasty, 14th century BC
Egypt's earliest
money
These ingots and metal rings date from the
fourteenth century BC and were found at el-Amarna. They give us
rare archaeological evidence for Egypt's earliest money
system.
Before coins
started to circulate in ancient Egypt around 500 BC, there was a
system of values based on weights of gold, silver and copper. Metal
measured in units of weight known as
deben (around 90 g)
could be used to settle bills and to trade. Records from the
Eighteenth Dynasty (1550-1295 BC) show that often the actual metal
did not change hands; instead it was used to value goods for
exchange. Egypt had no easily accessible source of silver, but the
Egyptian word for silver,
hedj, came to mean
something close to
'money'.
The
complete ingots from el-Amarna weigh around 3
deben (265-286 g) and
the rings seem to be fractions of the
deben.
J. Williams (ed.), Money: a history (London, The British Museum Press, 1997)