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"The bodies belonged to a woman, aged between 35 and 50, who was clutching jewellery and coins" Funny to see that some things never change. You're about to get
by qq66 2y ago
"The bodies belonged to a woman, aged between 35 and 50, who was clutching jewellery and coins"
Funny to see that some things never change. You're about to get vaporized by a pyroclastic avalanche and your first thought is to grab your bling.
- mimentum 2y agoProbably were prayer beads or something. Still 'bling' I guess.
- melling 2y agoNo banking system. I imagine without any money in ancient times, you could end up in trouble quickly.
- worldsayshi 2y agoThey must've had banks. I don't think you can have organised society without some form of banks.
- Terr_ 2y agoLocal banks don't necessarily mean your balance would be safe if the city were destroyed.
- neuronic 2y agoRoman bank offering geo redundance is probably not what I was thinking about this morning. "italia-south-1 was hit by a volcano yesterday, we are failing over to dalmatia-west-1 until issues are resolved. There may be some latency with obtaining coins today."
- Terr_ 2y ago"Experts do not believe the sudden liquidity of local currency will help this issue."
- cjs_ac 2y agoThere were money lenders (argentarii) but they were just individuals setting up stall in the local forum. If you exhausted your credit with one argentarius you just went and found another who didn't talk to the first.
- Anotheroneagain 2y agoThe Romans actually didn't think that killing people was wrong per se, so maybe that wasn't the best strategy.
- neuronic 2y agoArchaic banking existed since 4th-3rd millenium BCE. This was surprising to me. The modern form of banking is rooted in 14th century Italy (Medici and so on) [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank
- ginko 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banking_in_ancient_Rome?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banking_in_ancient_Rome?useski...
- rsynnott 2y agoThey had… bank-like things, but in general they’d have been quite local; if your city is in the process of being destroyed, the prospects of your bank are poor.
- Anotheroneagain 2y agoCoins are an iron age invention. Bronze age civilizations didn't know money.
- 52-6F-62 2y agoRome wasn’t a bronze age civilization. Bronze age civilizations had money. Coins as we think of them became widespread in the iron age. Shekels, for instance, go back much further.
- Anotheroneagain 2y agoI didn't say it was. It was meant to refute the claim that you can't have an organized society without banking.
- inglor_cz 2y agoRomans produced so many coins that you can buy genuine Roman coins relatively cheaply online. They are found absolutely everywhere in the ancient port cities and Rome itself, every construction project will unearth a ton of lower denomination coins. The Roman empire was thoroughly monetized.
- Anotheroneagain 2y agoThe bronze age wasn't. The way it worked seems to be that there was a guy who knew what you wanted, knew what you produced, and knew people who could produce what you wanted, and he supplied you with it, and wanted what you could produce in return. Acting as a sort of intermediary between everybody else.
- inglor_cz 2y agoWell, neither was the Stone Age, but why are you even talking about the Bronze Age under a link that discusses Pompeii? The relevant event took place in 79 AD, long after the end of the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean.
- inglor_cz 2y agoIt is hard to build a distributed banking system without reliable accounting, and reliable accounting in Europe only became possible with the import of Indian/Arabic positional numeric system. We underestimate just how much of a burden on arithmetics the previous systems were. Too unwieldy. On a similar note, I believe that for the same reason, the Chinese language will never achieve mass adoption in the rest of the world. The script is too complicated and reaching effective literacy takes much longer than with Latin characters.
- mkehrt 2y agoOh come on, no one was doing arithmetic in Roman numerals. They were using abaci and writing down the results.
- inglor_cz 2y agoThat is precisely the problem. Abacus sorta works, but arithmetics is much more efficient for the same purpose, and gives you ability to do calculations that can't be done using an abacus. It is a difference similar to the one between a horse and a car.
- ndsipa_pomu 2y agoWouldn't using an abacus imply using a base-10 system (i.e. not Roman numerals)? Or were there specific abaci designed around the Roman system?
- mkehrt 2y agoWikipedia says it was base 10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_abacus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_abacus
- ndsipa_pomu 2y agoThat's interesting that it implies that they had concepts of zero and place-value number systems. I can imagine Romans complaining about people sticking with the Roman number system as they converted numbers to and from their abacus.
- Ekaros 2y agoBut not certificates of credit. So you could store money, but you could not deposit it and then get fungible currency from other bank.
- dboreham 2y agoThere was some sort of financial system. Evidence for this is a large lead "whiteboard" in the museum in Rome that records a bunch of mortgages.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- chgs 2y agoPeople who have a grab bag will have some cash in it today.
- araes 2y agoSomething to acknowledge. Slightly wanted to mock because of how predictable it is that they're holding money while they died. And that the priority seemed like it was the coins and jewelry. However, even in the modern era, somebody with a "bug out bag" or a "Wake Up, Stuffs Happening (WUSH) bag" still includes "cash" as one of the main includes in the top priorities [1] [1] Basic 72-Hour Bug Out Bag List, https://www.bugoutbagbuilder.com/learning-tutorials/bug-out-bag https://www.bugoutbagbuilder.com/learning-tutorials/bug-out-...
- worldsayshi 2y agoPerhaps they were in the process of evacuating and they wanted to gather their valuables to protect from looters?
- andrelaszlo 2y ago"The woman was still alive while he was dying" If I ever die, I hope it's after I'm long gone...
- INTPenis 2y agoI'm convinced that most of the victims found are part of the working/slave class. So I can't help but fantasize that they had gone through their already evacuated owner's possessions thinking the world was ending, they died clutching whatever they could grab.
- morkalork 2y agoWhen you said something about things never changing, I thought you were going with the part where they think she (30s) could be the rich man's (50s) wife.