tour 2 of 13
The wealth of Africa
Ancient Egypt
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'.
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. The complete ingots weigh
around 3 deben (265-286
g) and the rings seem to be fractions of the
deben.