A new study of ancient silver hoards from Israel and Gaza suggests that metal was used as currency in the Bronze Age, hundreds of years earlier than previously suspected.
Ancient silver hoards from Israel and Gaza, which contain not coins but irregularly cut pieces of the precious metal, may be the earliest known silver currency in the region and likely came from the faraway regions of what is now Turkey and Europe, a new study suggests.
"We know that the Middle Bronze Age is a period of [making] large ramparts and fortifications," Tzilla Eshel , an archaeologist at the University of Haifa, told Live Science."But how do you pay your workers?" "The use of silver as currency [in the southern Levant] came in this period because it was needed," Eshel said,"[and] there was a big enough organization that could manage it."Ancient silverEshel and her colleagues studied 28 pieces of silver from four hoards found at Bronze Age archaeological sites: one from Gezer in the Judaean Mountains, one from a tomb at Megiddo in northern Israel, one from Shiloh in the West Bank, and one from Tell el-ʿAjjul in Gaza.
"There would have been different means of exchange, which is always true," she said. But"silver was the means of reference … so if you wanted to value your wheat, or to value your textiles, you would have valued them in silver shekels." A shekel was an ancient measurement of weight, in use since Mesopotamian times, that was equal to just over a third of an ounce, or about 9.6 grams.
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