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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;EWC3, post: 3310301, member: 93416&quot;]I found the book by Barry Kemp very good on this.</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Ancient_Egypt.html?id=Jn2N_bQrzS8C&amp;redir_esc=y" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Ancient_Egypt.html?id=Jn2N_bQrzS8C&amp;redir_esc=y" rel="nofollow">https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Ancient_Egypt.html?id=Jn2N_bQrzS8C&amp;redir_esc=y</a></p><p><br /></p><p>Here is a sketch - mostly taken from what he says about the general picture – (taken from memory)</p><p><br /></p><p>People for the most part (peasants excluded) got a grain allocation from the Pharaoh according to their status. An aristocratic household would get a lot – more than they needed to consume. State workers got less, (and occasionally went on strike about that matter).</p><p><br /></p><p>A big aristocratic household might employ a guy full time to trade the excess grain for other goods and services the household needed to buy in. And so on down the line for smaller people. There would be a lot of the sort of awkward bartering of the sort that Aristotle talks about - as people moved out spare stuff in exchange for what they needed. Scenes painted in tombs might well represent markets that were a bit like what we would call car boot sales in the UK – except it was done by swapping.</p><p><br /></p><p>People did have conventional ideas about money values, expressed in weight of metal or volume of grain – and would use that to figure out the rough of value of everything else. But that was a kind of mental tool in their bargaining plans most times I suspect.</p><p><br /></p><p>It is much simpler to sell your stuff for coins and then use the coins to buy what you need. Pericles did this, Aristotle explains it. But the Egyptian state system relied upon a lot of peasants growing a lot of grain and giving to temples as a kind of tribute. Peasants kept some to eat and no doubt they kept back a bit of excess to swap for stuff too. But once you create coins and markets, you run the big risk of what the Egyptian state would see as a smallish black market turning into a really big one – peasants try to sell the lot for themselves - and the whole pharoanic system would come crashing down.</p><p><br /></p><p>My key point here is that the main problem was not about, as I see it, inventing coins. It was about who won and who lost out, in the transformation to coin use.</p><p><br /></p><p>Rob T[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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