While, with the exception of China, Bronze Age civilisations didn’t have _coins_, they did sometimes have some concept of money. From the Code of Hammurabi (~1

While, with the exception of China, Bronze Age civilisations didn’t have _coins_, they did sometimes have some concept of money. From the Code of Hammurabi (~1750BCE): > If a man rents a boat of 60-[kur] capacity, he shall give one-sixth [of a shekel] of silver per day as its hire. At this point, a shekel is a unit of weight, not a coin, but is already being used as, effectively, money. Coins were initially more a convenience thing than anything else. Primitive banking-type activity is also showing up in this time period; institutions, mostly temples, taking deposits and lending with interest. And really, for most of the world (Ancient India did have some _slightly_ more sophisticated bank-like behaviour), that’s more or less where it stayed til the 17th century or so.