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One thing I always wonder is how did all these countries manage to find enough gold to run an (albeit tiny) economy off them? I've never heard of/seen a gold m

One thing I always wonder is how did all these countries manage to find enough gold to run an (albeit tiny) economy off them? I've never heard of/seen a gold mine in the UK, and yet 2000 years ago they were mining enough to mint currency. Was it all relatively surface level and rapidly mined out, and now all gone?

CuriousCosmic 3y ago
more or less yes. Everything that was easy to find and extract largely has been.
Waterluvian 3y ago
> Was it all relatively surface level and rapidly mined out, and now all gone? Pretty much. Elemental gold or relatively easy to refine alloys were stripped off the land over many thousands of years. Now we have to go deeper to find more.
okr 3y ago
I would guess these currencies took over gradually. And they never really disappeared. So it got more and more.
cyberax 3y ago
Most of the economy back then was non-monetary. If you're interested in this area, look up the Inca Empire. It did not really have money at all.
- 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
  I'm fairly sure that's not accurate. Source for "most" economies not having money? It would appear based on some simple googling that "money" has existed in many cultures going back 30,000 years, in two forms: "money of account" and "money of exchange". Of both of those they have taken various forms. Minted coins did not appear until around 3,000 years ago.
  - cyberax 3y ago
    "Monetary economy" means that it uses money for the exchanges, rather than barter. Most pre-industrial economies were not monetary. Barter economy certainly existed, probably from before the Human Sapiens. But _money_ is a relatively recent invention.
    - ETH_start 3y ago
      Good paper from the progenitor of the blockchain, Nick Szabo, positing that the first moneys emerged up to 75,000 years ago and possibly enabled Homo sapiens sapiens to supersede Neanderthals: https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/CDROM/Literature/LOTwinterschool2006/szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/C...
      - cyberax 3y ago
        I seriously doubt that currency (a standardized medium of exchange) existed in prehistoric times. But barter economy certainly did, we have plenty of archeological evidence for it. Still, even the barter economy was used for mostly "optional" activities. People were not dependent on it for survival, a tribe could live just fine on their own, without trade.
        Wytwwww 3y ago
        > currency (a standardized medium of exchange) That's a pretty recent innovation, standardized coins didn't appear until the 600s BC, barely 100-150 years or so prior to the Greco-Persian wars. Widescale international trade existed for 1000+ years prior to that as far as we know, you don't necessarily standardized money for that.
        ben_w 3y ago
        I'm not sure why you're describing 600s BC as "recent"?
- monero-xmr 3y ago
  They used money. The Incas had a system for accounting using knots https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu You don’t need physical coins to have money
  - cyberax 3y ago
    They certainly used _accounting_, but not money (currency). They were not assigning certain monetary value to items.
    - monero-xmr 3y ago
      I think it’s highly likely that a system built for counting was used for counting loans, debts, and resources. The foundation of civilization is resource allocation.
      - scarecrowbob 3y ago
        I'm not an expert in this so maybe am just off base. But the key difference (I have been told) is what you can do with that accounting. Like, I can walk into a shop and buy anything on the wall with money, whereas that kind of accounting may have very different implications for what you can do with it. Additionally, I can take money that I gathered from one source and use it somewhere else, and it's fungible in that I can use it anywhere else in the system. If I have a debt to one person in earlier systems that debt may be non-transferable. If those two elements are true, it becomes very difficult to do a lot of the things that we think of as money, specifically interest and massive accumulation.
      - cyberax 3y ago
        It assumes that Inca used formal loans and debts. They certainly used accounting for resources, though.
  - weatherlight 3y ago
    An accounting system using knots isn't money, per ser. These systems of credit were based on mutual trust and social relations, often without a physical representation of money as we know it today. Comparing this to coinage, the innovation of coins introduced a standardized physical object that could represent value, which allowed for a different kind of economic activity not solely based on personal trust and relationships. Coinage enabled transactions with strangers and facilitated trade over larger distances and among larger groups of people, where personal credit relationships were not feasible. Money, has a specificity to it. In essence, while early credit systems were based on social relationships and trust within communities, coinage represented a more impersonal and widely accepted medium of exchange that did not necessarily rely on social bonds. This distinction is crucial because it allowed for the expansion of trade and the concept of money as an abstract unit of account, rather than a direct reflection of social debts and credits.
- andsoitis 3y ago
  > Most of the economy back then was non-monetary. In 600 BCE, Lydia's King Alyattes minted what is believed to be the first official currency, the Lydian stater. The coins were made from electrum, a mixture of silver and gold that occurs naturally, and the coins were stamped with pictures that acted as denominations. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/07/roots_of_money.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/07/roots_of_money.asp But also note that physical currency is not necessary for “money”. Money has been around for about 5000 years, ridding us from barter.
gilleain 3y ago
Interesting question - it seems like there were Welsh mines in Roman times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolaucothi_Gold_Mines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolaucothi_Gold_Mines > They are the only mines for Welsh gold outside those of the Dolgellau gold-belt, and are a Scheduled Ancient Monument. They are also the only known Roman gold mines in Britain, although it does not exclude the likelihood that they exploited other known sources in Devon in South West England, north Wales, Scotland and elsewhere.
- lostlogin 3y ago
  Thanks. The wiki on this mine is quite extensive. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolaucothi_Gold_Mines https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolaucothi_Gold_Mines
weatherlight 3y ago
Phenomenal book that cover's this exact topic, "Debt: The First 5000 Years." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years "The book argues that debt has typically retained its primacy, with cash and barter usually limited to situations of low trust involving strangers or those not considered credit-worthy" It would make sense that cash would pop up once the Romans arrived, and would be in small amounts to facilitate spot transactions between Romans and the pre-Roman peoples of Britain and why there's such little amounts of cash. Further more, I can imagine a scenario where Roman coins were melted down to make these coins (total conjecture) .
- 7thaccount 3y ago
  I've seen some work on this as well. It would make sense in small tight knit communities to help out your neighbor when you could and vice-versa. There would be a relatively small need for coinage until things became a lot more complex and urbanized.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  That's still true nowadays if you limit 'cash' to just physical currency.
  - weatherlight 3y ago
    its not quite the same, I explain why in the comments below this one. :)
- LudwigNagasena 3y ago
  The book is a combination of anecdata and speculation presented in a polemical style. Not really something that I would call “phenomenal”.
  - weatherlight 3y ago
    the book stimulates important discussions on economic history and the roots of our financial systems. While its style is assertive, its contribution to questioning established economic assumptions is undeniably valuable. its also backed by anthropological and archaeological evidence.
permo-w 3y ago
I've never heard of a gold mine in the UK, but Welsh gold is something you often see and hear of, whatever that tells you
netbioserror 3y ago
As early as the Bronze Age, Britain was part of wide-spanning trade networks that funneled Cornwallish tin to the empires of the Near East. I would imagine that even before the invention of true coinage, various quantities of gold and other precious metals were circulating in Britain from those Mediterranean sources.
- Turing_Machine 3y ago
  > As early as the Bronze Age Note that while Great Britain didn't have a whole lot of gold, it did have a whole lot of tin. You can't make bronze without tin. People who want to make bronze will give you gold for it.
- 867-5309 3y ago
  >Cornwallish Cornish would do
justincormack 3y ago
I have been in a gold mine in Wales, I think it was this one that is Roman https://www.visitwales.com/attraction/visitor-centre/dolaucothi-gold-mines-1237509 https://www.visitwales.com/attraction/visitor-centre/dolauco...
nn3 3y ago
They didn't necessarily need gold. For example in bronze/iron age trading it was common to use relatively standardized small bars of other metals for payment. These were not coins, but approximately had the same function.
dghughes 3y ago
> how did all these countries manage to find enough gold They may not have. Some gold mixed with silver or other metals may have been common. In other words counterfeiting whether officially sanctioned or by thieves was probably not uncommon.
- lostlogin 3y ago
  I have a ‘silver’ Roman coin, but it’s a thin layer and it’s bronze underneath.
- tnecniv 3y ago
  Rome certainly did that at different points when funding was needed
creer 3y ago
To complement the answer "yes, there was surface level gold which was simply mined, and early", also 2000 years ago is not that long ago. By that time there was commerce going on across all of Europe, and gold had been used in coins and jewelry or cult items by most of these cultures for a long time BEFORE that. So that any specific gold could actually have come from elsewhere.
Simon_ORourke 3y ago
There's plenty of gold, or at least there was, in the south west of Britain back in the day. I'd assume pre Roman gold was all surface level stuff, but there were stories of way more industrial processing of silver by the Romans in Spain. https://www.jstor.org/stable/296070#:~:text=The%20silver%20mines%20of%20Spain,choicest%20fruits%20of%20their%20conquest https://www.jstor.org/stable/296070#:~:text=The%20silver%20m....
retrac 3y ago
In a few rare spots of the world, gold is literally just in the dirt and rocks. There's certainly some gold in the UK; there's still probably thousands of extractable tonnes of gold in the UK. Whether a deposit is economic to extract is a different question. Very few sites in the world can compete with the gold mines of Canada, China and Australia with their very rich deposits. > Was it all relatively surface level and rapidly mined out, and now all gone? To some degree this is a factor. Copper and tin are other resources you'll find are already heavily extracted in Europe: > The main mining district of the Kupferschiefer in Germany was Mansfeld Land, which operated from at least 1199 AD, and has provided 2,009,800 tonnes of copper and 11,111 tonnes of silver. The Mansfeld mining district was exhausted in 1990. It's not so much that they literally ran out - there's still plenty of copper there. But it was only viable to run in the East German (Communist) economy. Now that most is extracted, there are diminishing returns. It takes more labour and processing and etc. than extracting from a deposit elsewhere would. When Europeans came to North America and reached regions that had never had a particularly high population density and had never had much mining - like in parts of the Rocky Mountains - they sometimes literally found gold dust lying at the bottom of riverbeds and chunks of gold ore sticking out of the side of cliff-faces. (Cue up a gold rush.) Europe's first large-scale miners probably had a similar experience of abundance once, many thousands of years ago.
spaceman_2020 3y ago
What’s surprising to me is that cultures all across the world agreed that this shiny metal was valuable and could be readily exchanged anywhere for goods and services. We know that gold is valuable today because of its distribution, availability and metallurgical properties. But random tribes who haven’t even seen an iron tool somehow decided that this shiny metal was scarce and valuable enough to hoard and desire. Is it something in the metal itself?
- eszed 3y ago
  Incorruptible - as in, doesn't rust - and is commonly found in a state that doesn't need to be refined.
- Wytwwww 3y ago
  It's shiny and very easy to work and doesn't rust. The complete opposite of iron, which didn't really become that widespread until the bronze age trade routes collapsed (tin and copper aren't found in the same place). Bronze was also a much nicer metal than iron back in those days. Much, much easier to work and about as strong.
- hiddencost 3y ago
  Scarcity is actually an incredibly valuable property. Control over gold production meant control over the money supply. Otherwise, anyone could inflate your currency into oblivion.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    Just imagine what would happen if the money supply consisted of pieces of paper that the government could print any time it wanted more money!
    - jamiek88 3y ago
      Unprecedented wealth and living standards? it’s not very evenly distributed wealth but our enormous economies are not limited by supplies of an arbitrarily valuable metal. All money is imaginary anyway.
dboreham 3y ago
There were gold mines: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_mining_in_Scotland https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_mining_in_Scotland https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_gold https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_gold
spacecadet 3y ago
lol age of empires man. There was gold just sticking out of the ground everywhere. You just needed some pleebs to mine it and carry it back to your keep. or was that stronghold? I forget XP
jmyeet 3y ago
There was gold mining in Britain (specifically Scotland) at least 2,500 years ago [1]. [1]: https://www.bullionbypost.co.uk/index/gold/gold-mining-in-the-uk/ https://www.bullionbypost.co.uk/index/gold/gold-mining-in-th...
pyuser583 3y ago
It came from trade. The exact provenance was not important. Herodotus tried to figure out where all the “stuff” is coming from, but mostly found stories he admits are far-fetched. Modern historians take pleasure in proving his “myths” to be fact. “Apparently there is some place in Asia where gold is mined by ants!”
fiedzia 3y ago
Gold is relatively common, it's just that most mines were mined completely or to the point where further exploration was not economically viable, so few were preserved, though many mines that we have been used recently for other minerals did contain some gold in the past. From first google link (https://www.bullionbypost.co.uk/index/gold/gold-mining-in-the-uk/ https://www.bullionbypost.co.uk/index/gold/gold-mining-in-th...): "Gold has been mined in Scotland for over 2,500 years. There was gold mining in Crawford from the early 1500s" - and that's just a few examples. I recommend reading about or visiting Great Orme if you are interested in mining, it's a copper mine that was in use since bronze age.
shrubble 3y ago
Remember that issuing coins was one way to demonstrate that you really were the sovereign, also. So getting a bunch of gold together and minting some coins was good for "show of authority" and marketing purposes.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 3y ago
  Plus if you run into financial trouble, you can debase the currency for a while before people catch on. I think somewhere I read that this eventually happened to most ancient-world currencies, except the Venetian currency (Venice being run by merchants).
markb139 3y ago
It may not be on the same scale of other countries, but the UK has gold deposits which have been mined for quite some time.

CuriousCosmic 3y ago

more or less yes. Everything that was easy to find and extract largely has been.

Waterluvian 3y ago

> Was it all relatively surface level and rapidly mined out, and now all gone? Pretty much. Elemental gold or relatively easy to refine alloys were stripped off the land over many thousands of years. Now we have to go deeper to find more.

okr 3y ago

I would guess these currencies took over gradually. And they never really disappeared. So it got more and more.

cyberax 3y ago

Most of the economy back then was non-monetary. If you're interested in this area, look up the Inca Empire. It did not really have money at all.

0xbadcafebee 3y ago
I'm fairly sure that's not accurate. Source for "most" economies not having money? It would appear based on some simple googling that "money" has existed in many cultures going back 30,000 years, in two forms: "money of account" and "money of exchange". Of both of those they have taken various forms. Minted coins did not appear until around 3,000 years ago.
- cyberax 3y ago
  "Monetary economy" means that it uses money for the exchanges, rather than barter. Most pre-industrial economies were not monetary. Barter economy certainly existed, probably from before the Human Sapiens. But _money_ is a relatively recent invention.
  - ETH_start 3y ago
    Good paper from the progenitor of the blockchain, Nick Szabo, positing that the first moneys emerged up to 75,000 years ago and possibly enabled Homo sapiens sapiens to supersede Neanderthals: https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/CDROM/Literature/LOTwinterschool2006/szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/C...
    - cyberax 3y ago
      I seriously doubt that currency (a standardized medium of exchange) existed in prehistoric times. But barter economy certainly did, we have plenty of archeological evidence for it. Still, even the barter economy was used for mostly "optional" activities. People were not dependent on it for survival, a tribe could live just fine on their own, without trade.
      - Wytwwww 3y ago
        > currency (a standardized medium of exchange) That's a pretty recent innovation, standardized coins didn't appear until the 600s BC, barely 100-150 years or so prior to the Greco-Persian wars. Widescale international trade existed for 1000+ years prior to that as far as we know, you don't necessarily standardized money for that.
        ben_w 3y ago
        I'm not sure why you're describing 600s BC as "recent"?
monero-xmr 3y ago
They used money. The Incas had a system for accounting using knots https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu You don’t need physical coins to have money
- cyberax 3y ago
  They certainly used _accounting_, but not money (currency). They were not assigning certain monetary value to items.
  - monero-xmr 3y ago
    I think it’s highly likely that a system built for counting was used for counting loans, debts, and resources. The foundation of civilization is resource allocation.
    - scarecrowbob 3y ago
      I'm not an expert in this so maybe am just off base. But the key difference (I have been told) is what you can do with that accounting. Like, I can walk into a shop and buy anything on the wall with money, whereas that kind of accounting may have very different implications for what you can do with it. Additionally, I can take money that I gathered from one source and use it somewhere else, and it's fungible in that I can use it anywhere else in the system. If I have a debt to one person in earlier systems that debt may be non-transferable. If those two elements are true, it becomes very difficult to do a lot of the things that we think of as money, specifically interest and massive accumulation.
    - cyberax 3y ago
      It assumes that Inca used formal loans and debts. They certainly used accounting for resources, though.
- weatherlight 3y ago
  An accounting system using knots isn't money, per ser. These systems of credit were based on mutual trust and social relations, often without a physical representation of money as we know it today. Comparing this to coinage, the innovation of coins introduced a standardized physical object that could represent value, which allowed for a different kind of economic activity not solely based on personal trust and relationships. Coinage enabled transactions with strangers and facilitated trade over larger distances and among larger groups of people, where personal credit relationships were not feasible. Money, has a specificity to it. In essence, while early credit systems were based on social relationships and trust within communities, coinage represented a more impersonal and widely accepted medium of exchange that did not necessarily rely on social bonds. This distinction is crucial because it allowed for the expansion of trade and the concept of money as an abstract unit of account, rather than a direct reflection of social debts and credits.
andsoitis 3y ago
> Most of the economy back then was non-monetary. In 600 BCE, Lydia's King Alyattes minted what is believed to be the first official currency, the Lydian stater. The coins were made from electrum, a mixture of silver and gold that occurs naturally, and the coins were stamped with pictures that acted as denominations. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/07/roots_of_money.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/07/roots_of_money.asp But also note that physical currency is not necessary for “money”. Money has been around for about 5000 years, ridding us from barter.

gilleain 3y ago

Interesting question - it seems like there were Welsh mines in Roman times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolaucothi_Gold_Mines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolaucothi_Gold_Mines > They are the only mines for Welsh gold outside those of the Dolgellau gold-belt, and are a Scheduled Ancient Monument. They are also the only known Roman gold mines in Britain, although it does not exclude the likelihood that they exploited other known sources in Devon in South West England, north Wales, Scotland and elsewhere.

lostlogin 3y ago
Thanks. The wiki on this mine is quite extensive. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolaucothi_Gold_Mines https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolaucothi_Gold_Mines

weatherlight 3y ago

Phenomenal book that cover's this exact topic, "Debt: The First 5000 Years." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years "The book argues that debt has typically retained its primacy, with cash and barter usually limited to situations of low trust involving strangers or those not considered credit-worthy" It would make sense that cash would pop up once the Romans arrived, and would be in small amounts to facilitate spot transactions between Romans and the pre-Roman peoples of Britain and why there's such little amounts of cash. Further more, I can imagine a scenario where Roman coins were melted down to make these coins (total conjecture) .

7thaccount 3y ago
I've seen some work on this as well. It would make sense in small tight knit communities to help out your neighbor when you could and vice-versa. There would be a relatively small need for coinage until things became a lot more complex and urbanized.
MichaelZuo 3y ago
That's still true nowadays if you limit 'cash' to just physical currency.
- weatherlight 3y ago
  its not quite the same, I explain why in the comments below this one. :)
LudwigNagasena 3y ago
The book is a combination of anecdata and speculation presented in a polemical style. Not really something that I would call “phenomenal”.
- weatherlight 3y ago
  the book stimulates important discussions on economic history and the roots of our financial systems. While its style is assertive, its contribution to questioning established economic assumptions is undeniably valuable. its also backed by anthropological and archaeological evidence.

permo-w 3y ago

I've never heard of a gold mine in the UK, but Welsh gold is something you often see and hear of, whatever that tells you

netbioserror 3y ago

As early as the Bronze Age, Britain was part of wide-spanning trade networks that funneled Cornwallish tin to the empires of the Near East. I would imagine that even before the invention of true coinage, various quantities of gold and other precious metals were circulating in Britain from those Mediterranean sources.

Turing_Machine 3y ago
> As early as the Bronze Age Note that while Great Britain didn't have a whole lot of gold, it did have a whole lot of tin. You can't make bronze without tin. People who want to make bronze will give you gold for it.
867-5309 3y ago
>Cornwallish Cornish would do

justincormack 3y ago

I have been in a gold mine in Wales, I think it was this one that is Roman https://www.visitwales.com/attraction/visitor-centre/dolaucothi-gold-mines-1237509 https://www.visitwales.com/attraction/visitor-centre/dolauco...

nn3 3y ago

They didn't necessarily need gold. For example in bronze/iron age trading it was common to use relatively standardized small bars of other metals for payment. These were not coins, but approximately had the same function.

dghughes 3y ago

> how did all these countries manage to find enough gold They may not have. Some gold mixed with silver or other metals may have been common. In other words counterfeiting whether officially sanctioned or by thieves was probably not uncommon.

lostlogin 3y ago
I have a ‘silver’ Roman coin, but it’s a thin layer and it’s bronze underneath.
tnecniv 3y ago
Rome certainly did that at different points when funding was needed

creer 3y ago

To complement the answer "yes, there was surface level gold which was simply mined, and early", also 2000 years ago is not that long ago. By that time there was commerce going on across all of Europe, and gold had been used in coins and jewelry or cult items by most of these cultures for a long time BEFORE that. So that any specific gold could actually have come from elsewhere.

Simon_ORourke 3y ago

There's plenty of gold, or at least there was, in the south west of Britain back in the day. I'd assume pre Roman gold was all surface level stuff, but there were stories of way more industrial processing of silver by the Romans in Spain. https://www.jstor.org/stable/296070#:~:text=The%20silver%20mines%20of%20Spain,choicest%20fruits%20of%20their%20conquest https://www.jstor.org/stable/296070#:~:text=The%20silver%20m....

retrac 3y ago

In a few rare spots of the world, gold is literally just in the dirt and rocks. There's certainly some gold in the UK; there's still probably thousands of extractable tonnes of gold in the UK. Whether a deposit is economic to extract is a different question. Very few sites in the world can compete with the gold mines of Canada, China and Australia with their very rich deposits. > Was it all relatively surface level and rapidly mined out, and now all gone? To some degree this is a factor. Copper and tin are other resources you'll find are already heavily extracted in Europe: > The main mining district of the Kupferschiefer in Germany was Mansfeld Land, which operated from at least 1199 AD, and has provided 2,009,800 tonnes of copper and 11,111 tonnes of silver. The Mansfeld mining district was exhausted in 1990. It's not so much that they literally ran out - there's still plenty of copper there. But it was only viable to run in the East German (Communist) economy. Now that most is extracted, there are diminishing returns. It takes more labour and processing and etc. than extracting from a deposit elsewhere would. When Europeans came to North America and reached regions that had never had a particularly high population density and had never had much mining - like in parts of the Rocky Mountains - they sometimes literally found gold dust lying at the bottom of riverbeds and chunks of gold ore sticking out of the side of cliff-faces. (Cue up a gold rush.) Europe's first large-scale miners probably had a similar experience of abundance once, many thousands of years ago.

spaceman_2020 3y ago

What’s surprising to me is that cultures all across the world agreed that this shiny metal was valuable and could be readily exchanged anywhere for goods and services. We know that gold is valuable today because of its distribution, availability and metallurgical properties. But random tribes who haven’t even seen an iron tool somehow decided that this shiny metal was scarce and valuable enough to hoard and desire. Is it something in the metal itself?

eszed 3y ago
Incorruptible - as in, doesn't rust - and is commonly found in a state that doesn't need to be refined.
Wytwwww 3y ago
It's shiny and very easy to work and doesn't rust. The complete opposite of iron, which didn't really become that widespread until the bronze age trade routes collapsed (tin and copper aren't found in the same place). Bronze was also a much nicer metal than iron back in those days. Much, much easier to work and about as strong.
hiddencost 3y ago
Scarcity is actually an incredibly valuable property. Control over gold production meant control over the money supply. Otherwise, anyone could inflate your currency into oblivion.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  Just imagine what would happen if the money supply consisted of pieces of paper that the government could print any time it wanted more money!
  - jamiek88 3y ago
    Unprecedented wealth and living standards? it’s not very evenly distributed wealth but our enormous economies are not limited by supplies of an arbitrarily valuable metal. All money is imaginary anyway.

dboreham 3y ago

There were gold mines: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_mining_in_Scotland https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_mining_in_Scotland https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_gold https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_gold

spacecadet 3y ago

lol age of empires man. There was gold just sticking out of the ground everywhere. You just needed some pleebs to mine it and carry it back to your keep. or was that stronghold? I forget XP

jmyeet 3y ago

There was gold mining in Britain (specifically Scotland) at least 2,500 years ago [1]. [1]: https://www.bullionbypost.co.uk/index/gold/gold-mining-in-the-uk/ https://www.bullionbypost.co.uk/index/gold/gold-mining-in-th...

pyuser583 3y ago

It came from trade. The exact provenance was not important. Herodotus tried to figure out where all the “stuff” is coming from, but mostly found stories he admits are far-fetched. Modern historians take pleasure in proving his “myths” to be fact. “Apparently there is some place in Asia where gold is mined by ants!”

fiedzia 3y ago

Gold is relatively common, it's just that most mines were mined completely or to the point where further exploration was not economically viable, so few were preserved, though many mines that we have been used recently for other minerals did contain some gold in the past. From first google link (https://www.bullionbypost.co.uk/index/gold/gold-mining-in-the-uk/ https://www.bullionbypost.co.uk/index/gold/gold-mining-in-th...): "Gold has been mined in Scotland for over 2,500 years. There was gold mining in Crawford from the early 1500s" - and that's just a few examples. I recommend reading about or visiting Great Orme if you are interested in mining, it's a copper mine that was in use since bronze age.

shrubble 3y ago

Remember that issuing coins was one way to demonstrate that you really were the sovereign, also. So getting a bunch of gold together and minting some coins was good for "show of authority" and marketing purposes.

0xDEAFBEAD 3y ago
Plus if you run into financial trouble, you can debase the currency for a while before people catch on. I think somewhere I read that this eventually happened to most ancient-world currencies, except the Venetian currency (Venice being run by merchants).

markb139 3y ago

It may not be on the same scale of other countries, but the UK has gold deposits which have been mined for quite some time.