But looking back in time, materials used as a standard payment for goods and services have included quahog-shell beads, cocoa beans, salt bricks, silk cloth, and bank receipts. And looking forward, there are ever more tap-to-pay apps and cryptocurrencies. Fortunately, several artworks from the Art Institute of Chicago’s collections can shed light on the question of what exactly money is and is not.
Cowrie shells
Grown by snails (called Monetaria moneta) in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, cowrie shells were favored as money across Africa, Asia, and Oceania from at least 1000 BCE until the mid-19th century. In fact, the Chinese character for cowries appears in several modern words associated with money and trade.
These shells were perhaps first valued across cultures as a symbol of water’s life-giving properties, which made them useful for protective magic and divination. But they were also widely recognized, easily portable, fairly durable, and difficult to counterfeit—the ideal currency. Furthermore, the farther away from the coast cowries were traded, the more valuable they became. This ceremonial belt from Central Africa, covered in hundreds of cowrie shells, was therefore an ostentatious display of wealth.
seals
The materials designated as money throughout history are often relatively rare, which gives them value but has resulted in frequent shortages. So for large purchases of land or loans to fund a trading venture, wealthy elites might instead stamp their personal sign onto a document to “seal the deal.” The modern English words seal and signature are derived from the Latin signum, or sign, for this reason.
The earliest seals, which appear in northern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) as early as 6000 BCE, were carved stones strung on cord or set into a ring for safekeeping. In some later Egyptian examples, the full name and titles of the owner are included instead of a personal symbol. This scarab belonged to “Har, Seal-Bearer of the King of Lower Egypt, Overseer of Sealed Goods,” according to its inscription.
Coins
Coins were invented at roughly the same time in three different locations across the globe: Greece and China in the 7th century BCE, and India in the mid-5th century BCE. The first coins in the Greek tradition were made around 640 BCE in Lydia, on the western coast of modern Turkey, from electrum (a gold and silver mixture) found in nearby rivers. These lumps of metal were hatch-marked or stamped by the ruler to confirm their weight and value, which made trade easier and safer.
Later coins included a symbol of the city, ruler, or patron deity that guaranteed its worth. This coin shows Demeter, goddess of the harvest, on the front and a tripod on the back; both grain and bronze tripods were used as money among the Greeks prior to the invention of coinage.
Silk
While cast bronze coins and even forms of paper money existed in China since ancient times, these currencies were never produced in sufficient quantities to spread beyond major cities. Value was instead measured in lengths of shimmering silk cloth, an important status symbol whose use in clothing and accessories was regulated by Chinese law.
Several dynasties paid their bureaucrats and soldiers with silk and received it as taxes and tribute from their subjects. Merchants sometimes also used silk luxury goods, such as the silk kimono worn by a Japanese courtesan on this painted silk hanging scroll, as payment on the so-called Silk Road, a network of trade routes that connected Asia, Africa, and Europe for much of recorded history.
Beads
Glass beads were commonly used as money in world trade from around 1000 BCE until the mid-19th century. These rare seven-layered multicolored glass beads were made by the famous glass workshops on the island of Murano (near Venice, Italy).
In the 16th century, Spanish colonizers brought massive quantities of glass beads, which were fairly cheap in Europe, to trade in Africa and the Americas, where glass was scarce, for gold and enslaved people. This string of beads was buried along with traditional Incan luxury goods as part of a mummy bundle in what is now Peru.
Paper Bills
Before the 1930s, there was no single federally issued paper currency in the United States. Each state instead chartered private banks and businesses to produce silver dollar certificates. These bills all looked different and could only be exchanged for silver dollar coins, which the paper money represented, at the location where they were issued. So bills lost value the farther they traveled from the place where they could be exchanged for coin.
Merchants were forced to keep catalogues, updated on a monthly basis, that depicted all the local currencies so that any bill a customer brought in could be checked for authenticity. Forgery was a widespread problem, which is why the artist Victor Dubreuil, who painted amazingly realistic images of dollar bills like this one, got in trouble with the Secret Service in the 1890s.
So, what is money?
Based on these examples from the museum collections, money can be any object (or representation of an object) that communities have recognized as valuable. It must be standardized but not easily copied to prevent fraud. And it should be portable so that it can be traded over long distances for other materials, goods, or services. But, importantly, the definition of money is not static. Will digital currencies replace coins by the end of this century? Will money be completely abolished some day? The answer remains to be determined by us all.
—Lillian Sellati, Kress Interpretation Fellow, Interpretation
Bonus Credit: Art as Money
Inspired by the Rembrandt painting Aristotle with a Bust of Homer (1653), this artwork questions the meaning and value of fame. The American artist Otis Kaye reworked Rembrandt’s painting in 1963 to emphasize that the value under consideration is monetary, as represented by the dollar bills and coins seemingly tucked behind the canvas or hung from the wood behind it.
The artist’s means of producing fame is painting, a so-called fine art whose subject matter was valued by early modern European scholars according to a strict hierarchy, from historical landscapes and portraits at the top to still lifes at the bottom. The way that Kaye has violently torn away the portrait painting to reveal bundles of cash asks whether art can or should be treated as money—an understandable query for an artist whose livelihood depends on private collectors and museums buying his paintings.
L.S.
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