From shells and spice to shekels and mites

How about a little frankincense for your birthday? It might not be your first choice for a present today, but at the time Jesus was born, it was a valuable gift. Suppose you lived in a country that had no banks, no checking accounts, no credit cards, and no paper money. Coins were rare. What would you do if you wanted to buy some candy? You'd have to go to the person who made candy and offer to trade something or do some work in exchange for the candy.

That's how people got the things they needed before money came into use. Thousands of years ago, people usually lived in small villages. They raised most of their own food, built their own simple homes and furniture, and made their own clothes. Or they might trade with a neighbor, giving him grain in exchange for animal hides or sheep's wool.

Then villages got bigger and people began to specialize. One person became a carpenter, another raised cattle. Trading became more common. But what would a weaver do if he needed bread, and the baker didn't need cloth? He might try to find out what the baker did need, perhaps some firewood, and trade cloth to someone else for firewood, then trade that to the baker. It could get pretty complicated.

So people began to assign values to items that were easy to trade, such as shells, beads, and metals like gold, silver, and copper. Because these metals had to be mined and refined, they were very valuable. At first these metals were traded in lumps called ingots. The ingots were stamped with information about their weight and value. Merchants would still have to weigh the ingots each time, though. Some metal might have been chipped or shaved off. Sometimes a merchant took a little nick out of the ingot to see if it was solid gold or contained some other metal inside.

Historians think the first coins may have been created, or minted, in about 700 BC in Lydia, a region in modern Turkey. These coins were round lumps of precious metals with their weight stamped on them.

A good coin would have a large seal on each side covering the entire area of the coin. That way, people could tell if any of the metal had been chipped or shaved off. (The ridges - called "reeding" - around the edges of modern coins were originally added so that you could tell if any metal had been nicked off.) The seal might be a picture of an animal, a politician, a god, or some other object. Traders brought coins to Greece and Iran, and their popularity grew.

By the 5th century BC, coins were being used throughout much of the Middle East and Mediterranean region. Rulers had coins minted to mark important events or with their pictures on them. Ancient Jewish coins were produced during only a relatively short period from 134 BC to AD 135.

Since coins in biblical times were hand-made, each might have a different weight and value. Merchants had to weigh the coins each time a trade was made. They used a set of balancing scales to do this. To weigh the coin, it would be put on one side of the scale, and counterweights of a known weight would be put on the other side until the scales balanced. Then the merchant knew that the coins weighed the same as the counterweights on the other side.

Scales like those used to weigh coins in biblical times have been traced back to 3000 BC in Egypt. They may have evolved from the shoulder yokes worn by people to carry heavy loads. The wooden yoke went across the carrier's shoulders and burdens were hung from the ends, divided equally so the load would balance. Balance scales are still used by scientists today to weigh tiny amounts of chemicals and other items.

To find out if a coin was made of pure gold without melting it down or damaging it, merchants used another invention from Lydia: a touchstone. Touchstone is a fine-grained velvety black rock, a kind of quartz. When a gold coin is rubbed on a touchstone, it leaves a stripe of a particular color. The color of the stripe is compared to the mark made by gold of a known purity. The test is quite accurate.

By the time Jesus was born, people in his region were familiar with coins. It's not likely that they used them for all their purchases, though. Bartering was still very common, and trades involved not only coins, but also other items of worth such as frankincense and myrrh.

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