Was Gold undervalued or was Silver overvalued in Ancient times?

Neither. Golden silver are just commodities, like pork bellies or soybeans. They have no inherent value other than what someone will give you for them. They are not money, so the ratio of what the two metals bring in the marketplace is important only to investors.

 

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Just because King Tut wasn’t buried with much of it doesn’t mean it was necessarily rarer.

Maybe he viewed silver as less worthy of being buried with him than gold.

I mean think about it like this:

How many plain old rocks were buried with him? Probably none. It doesn’t mean rocks were rare only that rocks weren’t worth burying with him.

 

I thought the Roman unit of account was the silver denarius?

Because even in the Bible Rev 6:6 it talks about “one quarter of wheat for a denarius” but not “one quarter of wheat for four sestercii”.

 

https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/silv/hd_silv.htm.
"Silver was used to fashion beads as early as the Predynastic Period (ca. 4400–3100 B.C.) and remained important for personal ornaments and cult objects in Egypt through Roman times. Temple inscriptions suggest that for much of Egypt’s history, silver was valued more highly than gold. However, unlike gold, which is known to have been brought from the Eastern Desert and Nubia, the sources of silver are obscure, and in view of the relative scarcity of local geological resources, assuredly much was imported from neighboring lands."

 

The gold/silver ratio that we ponder over was related specifically to coins, not the ‘free-market’. The GSR is calculated as the ratio of the value of equal weights of coins. For example, (weight of Aureus) x (rate (25)) / (weight of denarius). Consider that between the reigns of Augustus and Septimius Severus, the silver in the silver coins virtually halved. If all else remained the same, the GSR would have halved. Presumably the exchange rate did not remain fixed and gold coins would have had to be bought from the mint, or dealers.

In modern times there is no direct link between gold and silver. They are just two separate bullion markets, their values dictated by demand.