Syrian bitumen found at Sutton Hoo

[EgonSpengler]

Just the other day I was chatting with a friend about the extent of pre-modern trade, and here this morning I read about a new discovery at Sutton Hoo. The British Museum and Aberdeen University have said that bitumen at the site has been traced to Syria. They think it was pine-tar used on the boat.

BBC, 1 Dec 16 - Sutton Hoo bitumen links Syria with Anglo-Saxon England

 

[Arakhor]

Wow. That's a name from my childhood. It's an interesting story too.

 

[AppleDumplingHead]

This doesn't say alot to me, because we've known eastern Med trade and influence to reach the Atlantic shores of Europe and Africa in the era of Carthage's prominence. Later, as Roman influence contained most of western Europe, we see the same entity occupying both Syria and Britain. 700 years later, I don't see why I'm supposed to be surprised by Anglo-Saxons being well acquainted with and in direct participation with eastern Med trade. It's almost like people think the world just started over because "those barbarians" invaded, but "barbarian" is only a matter of perspective. There were some dumb people who tried to pound square pegs through round holes and there were some pretty informed, calculating, some even progressive, people, too.

 

[Flying Pig]

Interesting indeed. It reminds me of coming across this a couple of years ago:



That's a coin of Offa of Mercia (r. 757-796 and built a rather famous dyke) made to look like an Arabic dinar - even including characters that look a bit like Arabic writing, but were clearly written by somebody who didn't speak the language. People in the 'Dark Ages' had wider horizons than we often think.

 

[Agent327]

It's not 'made to look like', but copied from a dinar. Not really related to 'wider horizons', but rather common practice in minting: simply make a crude copy of a solid currency. There are innumerable examples of such copies. The interesting thing, of course, is that knowledge of dinars can virtually only have come from Arab trade. So the wide horzion would be that of the Arabians.

 

[Flying Pig]

That depends on why you think Offa decided to try and copy the coin. There certainly are examples (I'm thinking of Celtic imitations of Alexander the Great's coins) where people simply model their currency after that of somebody else - the point not being to pass it off as an Alexander coin, since anybody can tell that the two are not the same, but more to use symbols which people respect on the understanding that people want coins, which they were previously getting from trade with Macedon, and aren't particularly fussy about whether they actually come from there, as long as they have the convenience and advantages of a decent coin supply. However, that doesn't really seem to explain what's going on here, because there are plenty of Anglo-Saxon coins from before Offa, and coins of Offa which look nothing like dinars. The current theory seems to be that the 'dinar' was made for trade with people used to handling dinars - again, obviously not intended to fool them, but in order to be something that they understood. It's possible, then, that it was supposed to be taken overseas - perhaps to Spain or the Holy Land - and traded there. On the other hand, it's also possible that the 'Arabic' writing is just ornamentation.

 

[Agent327]

Really? Coins don't have random ornamentation, AFAIK. I'm not even sure if this is an 'Offa coin'. In the sense that it was minted on Offa's authority, by an Offa-approved mint, as Offa-circulation money. The idea that it was minted to serve as currency in dinar country is just a bit far off, really. As I said, the dinar at this time would be a solid currency. This in itself 'invites' copies of dinars in areas without such a solid currency. Indeed, as said, the very reason to copy would be that the dinar was a solid currency. That wouldn't really matter in non-dinar areas, but it would in dinar-areas - if you follow my meaning. It's like trying to pass off faux Adidas/Gucci/Rolexes in the USA, to use a modern example.

 

[innonimatu]

The only thing that really mattered with coins was if they had the adequate weight and purity, the decoration was a convenience. Proof of that is that coins circulated years and centuries after they were minted. The standard that became the dollar was born in the spanish mints of south america, and that in turn was inspired in an earlier german coin. The users of those coins issued by the millions cared nothing for any message in the coin other than its value. Every ruler/issuer decorated his coins, and like having his name on them (in this case I can see "offa rex" quite clearly) but that decoration did not carry much meaning to the users other than "this coin is authentic" at first sight (gold is unmistakable, but the purity and weight had either to be checked, or trusted to roughly respect some standard).
It seems entirely reasonable to assume that a coin minted in Britain to look like a "continental standard" was meant for continental trade. And dinars were indeed widely used across Europe at the time. Together with the byzantine solidus they were the international gold currency of the time.

 

[Agent327]

That would be entirely correct - except for the claim that ' the decoration was a convenience', which is already disproved by the fact that the Offa coin carries a dinar similarity, i.e. it was made to look like a solid currency. You could simply mint coins with no decoration at all; and in that case, the actual metal of which it consists would be all that mattered. After all, it's not the coin or the the decoration that's the convenience, but the currency as such. In theory, anything can serve as currency - and in pre-modern times it also did. Just as today, virtual coin can serve as currency. That would be our convenience. But even a virtual coin needs some actual 'backup' to make it actual currency.

I would also make a footnote at the statement that dinars were widely used across Europe at the time. Certainly in Southern Europe, yes, as the Mediterranean trade network was virtually taken over by the Arabs. But most other coin finds tend to be Roman/Byzantine.

 

[Flying Pig]

Within a country, a coin doesn't strictly need any backing at all - the reason that you want drachmai, in an economy where you can get by in trade without them, is because somebody will come from the state demanding taxes, and those taxes need to be paid in drachmai, and if you don't pay, you'll be punished. It doesn't actually matter what the coin is 'worth' as a material object, provided that the state is willing to accept it - if so, there's no reason for anyone else not to accept it, since it's just as useful to them.

However, there are two caveats to that. The first is that a debased coin might be counterfeit - somebody might have taken some genuine coins or the equivalent value of precious metal and melted them down with something else, making a profit - and the state will not accept counterfeit coins - in fact, it might punish their possession. The second is that 'international' trade doesn't work on that basis, since the Syrian merchant receiving your English shilling will never have to pay English taxes, and money isn't changing hands often enough to make it worth keeping it to trade with people who will. So in those circumstances, the 'exchange rates' are set by the weight of precious metal in the coin.

The problem with ancient debasement isn't, as often quoted, that it reduced the metal value of the coins and that this was necessarily tied to their exchange value, but rather that it was a means of increasing the money supply without increasing the amount of goods and services in the economy. Whether your money is on gold or on paper, that's inflationary.

What does decoration have to do with all that? Firstly, it is a stamp of authenticity - a signal that Offa will, indeed, accept the coin in taxes. By extension, it's a mark of purity - the very first coins actually had their centres punched, to prove that they were precious metal the whole way through. Why is this important? Because most people don't carry around weighing-scales, so the official mark of 'one dinar', 'one solidus', 'one drachma' or whatever is how they tell what the coin is worth. In this case, it's speaking the language of Arabic merchants (and those used to working in their currency), saying that this coin is equivalent to their own dinars - the implication being that they could weigh it if they liked, but there's no need to bother, as long as the coins are generally considered trustworthy. People also need some way to detect forgeries. The idea of the decoration is, then, also to be difficult to imitate - and here the Arabic writing would be quite a good tool for that, because it is at once complicated and easy to tell the difference if you're holding a 'good' coin and a 'bad' imitation against each other.

 

[Agent327]

Within a country, a coin doesn't strictly need any backing at all - the reason that you want drachmai, in an economy where you can get by in trade without them, is because somebody will come from the state demanding taxes, and those taxes need to be paid in drachmai, and if you don't pay, you'll be punished. It doesn't actually matter what the coin is 'worth' as a material object, provided that the state is willing to accept it - if so, there's no reason for anyone else not to accept it, since it's just as useful to them.

So your state wants taxes in drachmai, but doesn't actually care what these drachmai are worth. Is this some sort of alt history idea? Because in the real world your state does care what its currency is worth, since all its expenses need to be paid with it.

 

[Flying Pig]

The state cares that only it can issue drachmai - that gives it a way to pay people, acquire property, and so on. Obviously, the state has an interest in making the production of a drachma cost less than its face value, but not in much beyond that. I mean, there are several documented cases of states increasing the money supply in times of undermonetisation by literally collecting in the coins and writing new numbers on the front. In the same way, the British pound used to be made in gold, and now isn't, but that's not the reason that a pound now buys you less - the causation is actually the other way.

 

[Agent327]

Why would you take in currency if you don't care about its actual value? But apart from that, there have been far more examples of states debasing their currency, hoping to save some money, and , lo and behold, achieving the exact opposite.

 

[Flying Pig]

The state isn't interested in the currency per se - if you think about it, what good is silver to a government, except that it can be made into coins? The state is interested in having a means to pay people without having to have enough land or industrial power to pay them all in kind. If you look at modern coins, there's a total disconnect between the face value and the metal value, and that was often true in Antiquity. What mattered, however, was confidence that the state - and therefore other people - would accept the coins at face value. Whether they were Lydian electrum, Athenian silver or Roman copper - or even the iron rods used in Sparta, or the seashells common in Polynesia - was not what fixed the value. The reason to use precious metals (which were, nearly always, state monopolies) was that it made the coins harder to imitate.

It works the same today, incidentally. If you pay your taxes in cash, the government says thank you very much, and puts it all in a shredder. The point isn't that the government wants paper banknotes - quite the opposite, it wants to reduce their supply to control inflation.

 

[schlaufuchs]

Why would you take in currency if you don't care about its actual value? But apart from that, there have been far more examples of states debasing their currency, hoping to save some money, and , lo and behold, achieving the exact opposite.

What Flying Pig said. The debasing of the currency wasn't a problem because there was less silver in the coin, the debasing of the currency was a problem because it represents a confidence shock to the public once it gets out the government was debasing its currency. It makes the government look weak and poor, and therefore less likely to pay its bills. It's also why governments were and still are so obsessed with cracking down on counterfeiters.

 

[Agent327]

A bit of a quirky argument, seeing as debasement and counterfeiting tend to have the same effect: more currency in circulation, resulting in a lower currency value.

The state isn't interested in the currency per se - if you think about it, what good is silver to a government, except that it can be made into coins?

I'm not sure if you noticed this, but that's a circular argument.

It works the same today, incidentally. If you pay your taxes in cash, the government says thank you very much, and puts it all in a shredder. The point isn't that the government wants paper banknotes - quite the opposite, it wants to reduce their supply to control inflation.

In short, the state is interested in currency for reasons of policy.

 

[Flying Pig]

The major problem with counterfeiting, as Owen suggested but didn't quite spell out, is that the whole system of currency depends on the fact that the government will accept the coins in taxation. That in turn depends on the fact that only the government can issue coins, because the whole point of the system is to create demand for something whose supply is controlled by the state. So they can't accept counterfeit coins - which means that people will be circumspect about accepting any coin when they know that counterfeits are common.

 

[innonimatu]

In contemporary states or in ancient big states it was true that the state itself set the value of coins (and precious metals) by controlling how much of it was issued. The persians did it, and Alexander later flooded the Mediterranean with the gold from the persian treasury. The Chinese managed to print notes and have them used for a time. This allowed states to issue currency with a higher face value than its metallic value, so long as they were strong enough to crack down on forgers.

Where this broke down was in weak states, and in international trade in the context of many states. Which explains the popularity of the gold standard in Europe into the early 20th century: it was used because of international trade, not because it was necessary to back national currencies (which were by then already abandoning precious metals as circulating currency). In ancient Europe after the fall of the roman empire states couldn't control the value of the currency used for long-distance trade, so it was the "foreign trade metal value" that mattered. Those that had some precious metals could mind currency for such trade, those that didn't could only mind coppers and very pool alloys of silver to be used internally as change (above their actual metal value).