And it only gets more fascinating the more you read about it. I remember Graeber also brought up the example of criminal fees somewhere in western Europe being

And it only gets more fascinating the more you read about it. I remember Graeber also brought up the example of criminal fees somewhere in western Europe being measured in actual human women even until fairly recently. Maybe at some point did people actually settle damages by transacting in women, but the measurement lived for far longer than the practise. It was just well known how many pigs corresponded to a human woman, and how many grains corresponded to a pig. (This was something scholars studied and found agreement on.) Graeber speculates that this whole idea of precisely measuring what one person owes to another started with criminal codes, fueled by a deeply human sense of tit-for-tat. Only quickly people realised an actual, literal, eye-for-an-eye is impractical, and it's better to conduct the transaction in something other than the specified fee.